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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



GOD'S EDUCATION 

OF MAN 

BY 

i 

WILLIAM DeWITT HYDE 

PRESIDENT OF BOWDOIN COLLEGE 




BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 

(C&e Bfoer#&e |&re$$, Camferi&ge 

1899 







742 

COPYRIGHT, 1899, BY WILLIAM DE WITT HYDE 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 



l COPIES RECEIVED. 






- 



1. ft V W> 




PREFACE 




HIS book attempts to indicate in a 
very general way, and also within 
a single small section to point out 
in considerable detail, the radical and far- 
reaching change which is taking place in 
theological conceptions. The general re- 
marks on the theological situation as a 
whole, and the outline of the larger circle 
of religious truth, I have placed by itself in 
the Introduction. This is for clergymen 
and such laymen as are not afraid of hard 
reading on fundamental themes. All others 
are earnestly urged to skip it altogether ; or 
at least not to assume in advance that the 
main portion of the book is as dry and bar- 
ren of practical results as the opening pages 
of this Introduction will appear to them 
to be. 

By way of a Conclusion, I have added a 



iv Preface 

discussion of two contrasted philosophical 
conceptions ; in which it is shown, by 
examples from philosophy, literature, art, 
politics, and missions, that in these kindred 
spheres there has ever been manifest that 
inevitable tendency to pass from abstract 
and transcendent to concrete and imma- 
nent conceptions, of which the position 
taken in the body of this book with refer- 
ence to Christian truth and life is simply 
one more example. This also, though by 
no means so hard reading as the Introduc- 
tion, the reader who is economical of effort 
and intent on edification alone is consider- 
ately counseled to omit. 

The three central chapters take up in 
detail, and restate in modern terms, the 
essential truths which the ancient doctrines 
of sin, redemption, and sanctification sought 
to express. So long as God and man were 
regarded as alien and mutually exclusive 
entities, the courts of justice afforded the 
most obvious analogy in which to formulate 
the relations between them. The new 



Preface v 

view, which regards God and man as kin- 
dred, — related to each other as vine to 
branch, father to child, — finds its most 
appropriate analogy in that drawing out of 
the small into the great, of the imperfect 
into the perfect, of the dependent into the 
independent, of the growing organ into 
the complete life, which we call educa- 
tion. Hence the title — God's Education 
of Man. 

This divine drawing-out of man has three 
stages : First : Man, the imperfect frag- 
ment, the dependent member, impelled by 
appetite and passion, sets himself up as a 
complete and self -sufficient end in himself, 
in defiant disregard of the bonds that bind 
him to his fellows and to God. This false 
attitude of self-assertion is sin; and has 
to be restrained by law, which is the asser- 
tion of the relation of the part to the whole, 
and of the claims of all on each. 

Second : The good, healthy organism re- 
claims the rebellious and unruly member ; 
God comes after runaway man; in spite 



vi Preface 

of his ill-deserts, offers him a share in 
his own large, generous life, and willingly 
takes upon himself the pain and sacrifice 
essential to fit an imperfect and unde- 
veloped member into place. This winning 
back of an unworthy and offending member 
to humble acceptance of his forfeited place 
in the spiritual world is the province and 
prerogative of grace. 

Third : The member restored to position 
in the structure must be trained to specific 
function in the world's spiritual life. This 
training to specific function, whereby the 
member becomes partaker in the whole life 
and joy of the God whom he gladly and 
freely serves in his specific service of his 
fellow-men, finds its consummation in the 
crown of Christian character. 

Instead of representing God primarily as 
judge or ruler, with a majesty to uphold 
and an authority to vindicate ; and man 
as a culprit or "probationer," concerned 
mainly with being punished or pardoned ; 
I have sought to present God as a wise and 



Preface vii 

patient teacher, eager to impart to man 
lessons which it is good for him to learn ; 
and man as a dull and stupid, often wayward 
and wilful, sometimes even fractious and 
rebellious pupil, whom the great teacher 
is patiently trying to train for usefulness 
and honor and blessedness and immortal- 
ity. 

In many respects any attempt to revive 
an interest in doctrinal theology is a thank- 
less task. Men have grown so weary of 
the unrevised systems of the past that 
they have come to doubt whether a new 
construction, adjusted to modern scientific 
and philosophical conceptions, is possible 
or desirable. Hence whoever makes even 
so slight an attempt at reconstruction as is 
presented here must expect to be charged 
with putting new wine into old bottles ; if 
indeed his product is conceded to be wine 
at all. Fortunately, fermentation is not 
the only process in nature from which analo- 
gies can be drawn. The thrifty householder 
brings forth out of his treasure things new 



viii Preface 

and old. Old trunks have been known to 
put forth new and vigorous shoots; and 
grafting is sometimes advantageous. 

WILLIAM DEWITT HYDE. - 

Bowdoin College, 
Brunswick, Me., August i, 1899. 



CONTENTS 



INTRODUCTION 

THE REORGANIZATION OF THE FAITH 

I. The Universal Will of God the Metaphy- 
sical and Ethical Basis of Christianity / 

II. Christ the Historic Revelation of the Uni- 
versal Will of God ... 26 

III. The Holy Spirit, God in Humanity. The 
Doctrine of the Trinity the Unessential 
Formulation of Essential Truths . . .?/ 

IV. Sin and Atonement 36 

V. The Organisation of the Spiritual Life, 

The Outlook for the Future . . . 41 

VI. The Present Need of Theological Construc- 
tion. The Function of Dogma . . 46 

CHAPTER I 

CONTROL BY LAW 

I. Man's Primitive Innocence and Early Fall 59 
II. The Universality of Law. The Unique 

Character of Hebrew Legislation . 6$ 

IIL Ceremonial Elements in the Law. The 

Ritualism that is Idolatry j2 



o6 Contents 

IV. The Law concerned chiefly with Right Re- 
lations between Persons . . . 74 
V. Gratification of Appetite in itself a Good. 

Specious Excuses for Sin y6 

VI. Answer to the Excuse that Certain Sins 
are " Natural." The Meanness of 

Sin 80 

VII. The Responsibility of Wealth . . . 85 

VIII. The Test of Pleasure . . . 90 

IX. The Moral Law in Politics 96 

X. The Pride of the Pharisee and the Conceit 

of the Perfectionist. The Inadequacy 

of Law 102 

CHAPTER II 

CONVERSION BY GRACE 

I. The Priority of Grace. Its Various Man- 
ifestations . . . . . . //■? 

1 1. Vicarious Sacrifice. The Sacrifice and the 
Forgiveness of Christ. How to bring 
Sinners to Repentance . . . . //p 

III. Justification by Faith. Its Justice and 

Reasonableness ..... 136 

IV. Conversion. Time and Manner. The 

Pastor's Class 142 

V. Regeneration a Gradual Process. Its Uni- 
versality and Necessity . . .146 

VI. The Scriptures the Interpreter of Christ . 150 



Contents xi 

VII. Prayer not Reflex Action but Vital Com- 
munion. Its Answer Inevitable . . 15$ 
VIII. The Need of Christian Fellowship. The 

Dawning Sense of Freedom . . . 157 

CHAPTER III 

CHARACTER THROUGH SERVICE 

I. Character the Completion, Service the Ex- 
pression, of the Work begun by Law 
and Grace 165 

II. Christian Character consists in doing one's 

Specific Work well for the Glory of God 
and the Good of Man . . . • 174 

111. The Sense of Proportion and the Art of 
Subordination Essential to the Highest 
Character and the Best Service . .184 

IV. The Church and its Services a Means, not 
an End. The Bane of Clericalism and 

Sentimentalism 190 

V. The Educational Analogy, The Minis- 
ter's Threefold Task .... 197 

CONCLUSION 

TWO TYPES OF IDEALISTS 

I. Plato and Aristotle . . . .2/^ 
II. Kant and Hegel 218 

III. Matthew Arnold and Robert Browning . 224 

IV. Garrison and Lincoln .... 229 



xii Contents 

V. Burne-Jones and fVatis . . . .27/ 
VI- Foreign Missions. President Nott and Sec- 
retary Anderson. Cyrus Hamlin and 
David Livingstone .... 233 
VII. The Practical Difference between the Two 
Types of Idealists. The Greater Difficulty 
the Greater Glory .... 245 



INTRODUCTION 



Come, my friends. 
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world. 
Push off, and sitting well in order smite 
The sounding furrows ; for my purpose holds 
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths 
Of all the western stars, until I die. 
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down ; 
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, 
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew. 
Tho' much is taken, much abides ; and tho' 
We are not now that strength which in old days 
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are, - 
One equal temper of heroic hearts, 
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will 
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. 

Tennyson : Ulysses. 

Not once or twice in our fair island-story 
The path of duty was the way to glory. 
He, that ever following her commands, 
On with toil of heart and knees and hands, 
Thro' the long gorge to the far light has won 
His path upward, and prevail'd, 
Shall find the toppling crags of Duty scaled 
Are close upon the shining table-lands 
To which our God Himself is moon and sun. 

Tennyson : Ode on the Death of Wellington. 




GOD'S EDUCATION OF MAN 



INTRODUCTION 

THE REORGANIZATION OF THE FAITH 

I 

The Universal Will of God the Metaphysical 
and Ethical Basis of Christianity 



HE current creed of Christendom is 
a chaos of contradictions. Truths 
and lies, facts and fancies, intui- 
tions and superstitions, essentials and ex- 
crescences are bound in one bundle of 
tradition which the honest believer finds 
hard to swallow whole, and which the ear- 
nest doubter is equally reluctant in toto to 
reject. It is high time to attack this chaos, 
to resolve it into its elements, and to re- 
organize our faith into a form which shall 
at the same time command the assent of 



2 God's Education of Man 

honest and the devotion of earnest men. 
This work cannot be done roughly with 
the broad-axe. The problem is not me- 
chanical, but vital. One cannot chop the 
creed in two, and say, "This half is true 
and that is false." We must discover the 
germ of life in the old and somewhat 
decrepit body of current tradition, and 
from that vital germ we must breed the 
fair and vigorous body of the faith that 
is to be. The new faith will not be a 
mechanical fraction of the old, whether 
large or small. It will be a reproduction 
of the essential features of the old in fresh, 
vigorous, functional relationship. 

What then is this living germ ? What 
is the pearl of great price, the one thing 
needful, the better part which shall not be 
taken from us, the hidden leaven, the grain 
of mustard seed, the rock foundation, the 
oil in the lamp, the sap in the vine, the 
blood in the veins which makes one mother, 
sister, brother of the Christ ? The answer 
to that question lies far back in psycho- 



The Ethical Basis of Christianity 3 

logy, deep down in metaphysics, high up in 
ethics. Hints only can be given within 
the compass of the first few pages of a 
single chapter. 

Whatever is, is incomplete. As Words- 
worth says : — 

" Whate'er exists hath properties that spread 
Beyond itself, communicating good, 
A simple blessing, or with evil mixed." 

Man is no exception. He too is made 
what he is by virtue of his relations to 
what he is not. There is no such being as 
a self-sufficient individual. Unus homo t 
melius homo. Men independent of social 
relations are as inconceivable as mountains 
without valleys. Things in relations, men 
determined by their social environment; 
the finite in the infinite, the individual 
responsible to universal claims, represent 
ultimate units, within which thought in- 
deed can by abstraction draw distinctions, 
but into which it can insert no dissecting 
knife. To cut a man off from his material 
environment and social relations would be 



4 God's Education of Man 

to sever him from himself. The residuum 
would be zero. 

So much, at least, the hardest-headed 
doubter would not venture to deny. He 
will admit that a man must have some 
ground to stand on, some room to turn 
round in, some environment to react against, 
some claims to respect, some standards to 
acknowledge, in order to be a man at all. 
He dares not cut so near the quick as to 
exclude all physical environment, all social 
obligation from what he calls himself. Yet 
even this concession is fatal to the atheist ; 
for, though at first he may not see its im- 
plications, it will give him no permanent 
resting-place for the sole of his foot until 
he finds rest and peace in God. For let 
him put in his knife as far from his individ- 
ual heart as he pleases ; let him make his 
physical environment and social relation- 
ships as big as he likes ; he is no better off. 
Let him make it as large as America : 
America cannot be cut off from Europe, 
either historically or geographically. Let 



The Ethical Basis of Christianity 5 

him make it as large as the earth : the 
earth's motions and structure and chemical 
constitution are inexplicable apart from the 
solar system. And if he undertakes to 
define in terms of either time or space the 
solar system, he must borrow his defini- 
tions from innumerable systems of which 
ours is but one. Whatever object he thinks 
about at all must be thought in definite 
relations to all other objects of his thought, 
must inhere in a single system of rational 
relations. The same experience awaits him 
if he asks himself the moral question, " Who 
is my neighbor?" Duty does not stop 
with the claims of the man next door, or 
across the street, or in the same town, or 
in the same state or nation, or across the 
ocean, or in the same century. Beings we 
never heard of and whom we shall never see 
will be the happier or the more wretched in 
consequence of what the humblest of us 
does or fails to do. Wherever there are 
conscious beings capable of knowing what 
we do and what we are, there are persons 



6 God's Education of Man 

under whose possible praise and blame our 
conduct falls. Here again the thoughts of 
these other persons, their praise or blame, 
are not mutually exclusive, unrelated judg- 
ments. They all inhere in and partake of 
a single system of spiritual obligation and 
moral judgment, the existence and univer- 
sality of which is attested by the tendency 
of all minds, in proportion as they are intel- 
lectually and morally developed, to come 
to an ever closer agreement concerning 
what is good and what is evil, what is right 
and what is wrong. This Thought which 
holds the universe in a single system of 
rational relations ; this Will which includes 
the acts and attitudes of all persons toward 
each other, which is present in all our indi- 
vidual thoughts, implied in all our confi- 
dence in our own memories, involved in 
all our communication with one another, 
assumed in all argument, asserted in all 
doubt, affirmed in all denial, — this Abso- 
lute Thought and Universal Will is the 
unescapable reality which the world agrees 



The Ethical Basis of Christianity y 

to call God. Our belief in him rests on 
the fact that no knife has ever been found 
sharp enough, and no surgeon skillful 
enough, to find the precise point, whether 
near or far, where the finite stops short, or 
duty comes to an end, or some things cease 
to belong to the same system of relations 
as other things; or we can excuse our- 
selves from membership in whatever phases 
of the moral and spiritual order we continue 
to think of and talk about. 

All this, doubtless, seems vague and re- 
mote from the point at issue. Fortunately, 
when we turn from the metaphysical basis 
to the moral structure of religion, we get a 
clearer outlook. For there are two sharply 
contrasted kinds of conduct. One kind of 
conduct makes the practical assumption 
that the interests of the individual or of 
some definite group of individuals, large or 
small, are the only interests to be consid- 
ered ; and that the interests of other people 
are to be subordinated, sacrificed, utilized as 
mere means to the interests of the individual 



8 God's Education of Man 

or of the tribe to which he happens to be- 
long. Such conduct may or may not con- 
form to the moral standards of the commu- 
nity ; it may or may not be beneficial in its 
direct practical results. All conduct which 
proceeds from this false individualistic stand- 
point, whether it happens to be beneficent 
or injurious, moral or immoral, is funda- 
mentally false and essentially irreligious. 

The other kind of conduct recognizes 
the thoughts and feelings and wills and 
claims of other beings as of equal reality 
and worth with those of the individual ; it 
recognizes that the interests of others and 
of self are fundamentally one, by virtue of 
their common inherence in a single moral 
and social system from which it is impossi- 
ble that any one of us should be divorced. 
It respects that system of relations, and 
the laws and customs through which it 
finds expression, and seeks primarily to do 
what is for the interest of all, considered 
as members of the single system of moral 
relations, rather than of self conceived as 



The Ethical Basis of Christianity g 

apart from others and from all. Such con- 
duct, whether its details be well or ill ad- 
vised, whether it wins the praise or blame 
of the immediate spectators, whether it 
actually works immediate good or harm, is 
fundamentally right and essentially reli- 
gious. 

Historically this consciousness of a uni- 
versal natural and moral order has emerged 
in very grotesque, inadequate, and often 
mischievous and immoral forms. Gods 
have been conceived as capricious, and to 
be cajoled; sensitive to slights, and to be 
appeased; overwhelming in majesty and 
might, and calling for man's abasement; 
jealous, and demanding his humiliation; 
unnatural, and gratified by the suppres- 
sion of his natural desires ; malevolent, and 
to be approached with dread; vindictive, 
and laying up a store of wrath to be vented 
in the world to come. Different races 
have emphasized different aspects of these 
attributes supposed to be divine. The early 
Hebrews were not without their share of 







io God's Education of Man 

these superstitions. Yet among them — 
thanks to the prophets — there slowly 
emerged the consciousness that justice and 
mercy are the right adjustments of the in- 
dividual to his social environment ; the true 
expressions of man's spiritual nature, the 
supreme demands of the divine will. That 
insight of the Hebrew prophets tallied 
with the analysis of the Greek philosophers, 
and was taken up and made the central 
principle of Christianity. Jesus saw and 
felt and knew that this comprehensive spir- 
itual Source and Environment of nature 
and of man, inasmuch as it includes all at- 
tributes and operations of all persons, can- 
not itself be less than personal ; he gave to 
it the personal name of Father, and revealed 
to mankind that the doing of the Father's 
will to all our fellow-men, his children, is 
the open secret of the blessed life. This, 
then, is the answer to the question as to 
the vital essence of Christianity with which 
we started out. 

Devout acceptance of this will of the 



The Ethical Basis of Christianity u 

Father and the universal good which it 
includes, as the principle and substance of 
one's own thought and action, is the essen- 
tial element in our Christian faith. The 
man who makes that will of God the basis 
of his character and the motive of his con- 
duct carries with him the living germ of 
Christianity ; for this principle, rightly ap- 
prehended, covers the whole of life. The 
man who has it will be kind and considerate 
in his home, upright and honest in his work, 
public spirited in civic and political relations, 
socially courteous and sincere, sympathetic 
with the suffering, generous to the poor, 
helpful to the weak. On the other hand, 
he will resist oppression, expose hypocrisy, 
denounce injustice, rebuke fraud, fight for 
timely and rational reform. He will do 
these things whether they are profitable or 
costly, popular or unpopular ; whether they 
bring thanks or curses, praise or blame; 
whether men strew his path with palms and 
hail him with hosannas, or crown him with 
thorns and nail him to the cross. 



12 God's Education of Man 

The man who has this disposition has 
God in his life, Christ in his heart, the Holy 
Spirit in his soul. It matters not whether 
he got it at the first hour or at the eleventh ; 
whether through Jewish law or Greek phi- 
losophy ; whether in a Catholic cathedral or 
in a Methodist chapel ; whether the articles 
of his creed are thirty-nine or none ; whether 
he succeeds in living up to his aim or per- 
petually fails; whether he can thank God 
that he is not like other men, or can simply 
cry, " Lord, be merciful to me a sinner ! " 
This disposition to make God's will of love 
to all mankind his own, in spite of repeated 
defeats, successive failures, seventy-times- 
seven wrongdoings repented in a day, if 
clung to, never despaired of, never at heart 
abandoned, makes the soul that has it, 
though it were the soul of a harlot or a pub- 
lican, the sister and the brother of the Lord. 
No man or woman to-day holds so crude a 
creed, or accepts so false a philosophy, or 
knows so little or so much of science and 
criticism, or has so bad a record, or so weak 



The Ethical Basis of Christianity 13 

a will, or so irritable a temper, or so sen- 
suous a temperament, that he or she need 
remain for one instant outside the Kingdom 
of God in consequence. If any such remain 
outside, it is because their pleasure or their 
pride, their prejudice or their distrust, keeps 
them from trying their best, with just the 
views and record and nature and capacity 
they have, to do the blessed will of God, 
and make the situation where he has placed 
them as holy and happy as they can. For 
the one thing needful, the germinal prin- 
ciple, the rock foundation, the oil that lights 
the lamp of life, the sap that makes the 
branch a member of the vine, the blood- 
relationship which constitutes one a brother 
or sister of the Christ, is the sincere dis- 
position to do the will of God. 

The raw material of the religious life is 
the distinction between right and wrong. 
He that hath that has the stuff to make 
a religion out of. He that hath not this 
distinction, sharp and clear and bright and 
sensitive, hath not the elements of the reli- 



14 God' s Education of Man 

gious life. Be true to that distinction ; 
follow its leadings, accept its conclusions, 
and the inevitable logic of life draws one 
into the presence of the living God. Lose 
it, let it grow dim and dull and blunt, and 
not all the evidences of all the apologists 
can make even the existence of a God a 
credible hypothesis. For to him that hath 
the moral insight, religious faith shall be 
given; from him that hath not the moral 
purpose, the religious assurance that he 
seemeth to have shall be taken away. 

Let us try to follow this logic of the 
moral life, and see how the purpose to do 
right widens into the presence and deepens 
into the peace of God ; how the absence of 
that purpose narrows the soul and hardens 
the heart, until the barren negations of a 
cold and cheerless atheism are all the poor 
shriveled soul and hollow heart can hold. 

Right and wrong are relations. When 
I do right, I acknowledge that there is a 
system of relations in which other beings 
as well as myself are included ; and I take 



The Ethical Basis of Christianity / 5 

my place as a member of that system of 
relations. This system of relations is not 
of my own making ; it is often not exactly 
to my individual liking. There it is, how- 
ever; and every right act of mine is a 
recognition of its presence, a fitting of my- 
self into it. In every right act I become 
a part of an order of beings, a member of 
a system of relations, greater than myself. 
Thus every right act is an enlargement of 
myself ; a saying to something higher and 
worthier than myself, "Not my will, but 
thine be done." What we shall call this 
larger sphere, what name we shall give to 
this something which we address in every 
act of righteousness, need not concern us 
at present. That there is something greater 
and higher than ourselves, which we re- 
cognize, and address, and obey in every act 
of conscious and deliberate rectitude, is 
sure. 

Every wrong act, on the contrary, is an 
attempt to deny that there is any system 
of relations larger and worthier than my- 



1 6 God' s Education of Man 

self. Wrong is not altogether successful 
in this denial, especially at first. For in 
the form of remorse, shame, condemnation, 
the violated order is still present with us to 
avenge its disregarded claims. Yet per- 
sistence in wrong-doing succeeds in stifling 
and deadening the remonstrances of this 
larger sphere of relations which we have 
violated; until at last the hardened heart 
scarce hears the condemning voice, and is 
left almost alone in waywardness. In so 
far, then, as wrong is successful and com- 
plete, it shuts a man into his own selfish 
will as the only spiritual reality which he 
recognizes. All things and all persons and 
all claims outside himself are treated, not as 
real and valid and equal or superior to the 
self, but as mere means to be disregarded 
and denied and trampled on at the dictates 
of selfish interest or wanton inclination. 
To such a person, faith in a spiritual God 
is absolutely impossible. He hasn't the 
material to construct such a belief out of. 
Such a man may have a sneaking dread of 



The Ethical Basis of Christianity iy 

a great avenger; a cringing fear of what 
this avenger may do to him in the hereafter. 
But that is mythology and superstition ; not 
rational religion or spiritual faith. This 
man has refused to recognize and respect 
the elements out of which a spiritual faith 
must be developed; and consequently he 
finds himself without a God ; or rather, what 
is worse, with a magnified image of his own 
hardness and cruelty and malignity, set up 
on the throne of his conscience, which was 
meant for the true God of goodness and 
love to occupy. 

Let us now return to the man who does 
right. We left this man conscious of a 
system of relations of which he is a part ; a 
member of a spiritual order, larger, higher, 
worthier than himself. Is such recognition 
of a system of relations, such participation 
in a spiritual order, equivalent to faith in 
God? It is the chief element in such a 
faith. For what is selfhood, or personality, 
as we know it in ourselves ? Is it not the 
power to reduce a manifold of impressions 



1 8 God's Education of Man 

to the unity of a single order, and to sub- 
ordinate a multitude of clashing impulses to 
the unity of a cherished purpose ? Hence 
the unified system of relations and the com- 
prehensive moral purpose, which all experi- 
ence of right conduct brings home to us, 
is the manifestation in the world without 
of those very principles of self-conscious- 
ness and self-determination which consti- 
tute the personality of the self within. 
Hence, doing right is knowing God. For 
it is recognizing a thought and will like 
our own, but vaster, higher, and holier. 
The man of the pure heart sees God ; for 
he sees and serves an order and a will like 
the order and will which organizes his own 
little world of appetites and desires into a 
system ; but as much more glorious and 
grand than the order and will within himself 
as the movements of stars and planets, the 
rise and fall of nations, the development 
and overthrow of institutions, are more 
grand and glorious than the petty passions 
that agitate his individual frame. 



The Ethical Basis of Christianity ig 

So much is sure and incontrovertible. 
If by belief in God we mean that we are 
enveloped by a universal system of reason, 
and upheld by an absolute order of right- 
eousness, then the existence of God is evi- 
denced in every true thought we think and 
every right act we perform. And every 
true and righteous man may be as sure of 
God's existence as he is of his own. 

Furthermore, this kernel of faith, hard 
and cold as it seems when taken by itself, 
if cast into the warm, rich soil of an earnest 
moral life, begins to swell and sprout, and 
take on more vital and attractive forms. 
Right is formal ; good is substantial. Every 
growing soul comes to do things less and 
less from a conscientious regard for what 
is right, and more and more from a loving 
devotion to what is good. The best work 
in the world is not done on the first and 
lowest plane of conscientious fidelity to the 
right. Mothers do not nurse and rear their 
children at the dictates of conscientious 
scruples. Patriots as a rule do not enlist 



20 God's Education of Man 

in the service of their country or die in her 
behalf at the dictates of their consciences. 
The mother's love draws her toward the 
child's good ; the patriot's love impels him 
toward his country's welfare. Right is the 
root ; good is the blossom of the spiritual 
life. When you have worked up through 
conscientious fidelity to the right, to warm 
appreciation of the good, then you begin 
to reap the rewards and benefits, the com- 
forts and consolations, of the spiritual life. 
He who does the right comes to see the 
good ; and he who sees the good finds God 
and blessedness. 

To do right out of a tender and loving 
regard for the persons who are affected by 
our action ; so to live that no man may be 
the poorer, no woman may be the sadder, 
no child may be more wretched for aught 
that we have done or left undone; so to 
live that through our words and deeds, men 
may see the truth, and enjoy the beautiful, 
and reverence the pure, and honor the 
noble, and possess the means of material 



The Ethical Basis of Christianity 21 

and social satisfaction — that is to share the 
life and love and blessedness of God. For 
whoever lives this life, not from mere con- 
straint of duty, but from love of those his 
life affects, soon discovers that in that life 
of love he is not alone. The satisfaction 
and the joy of it attest the fact that this is 
the life he was meant to live by the Father 
in whose image he is made ; and he knows 
that every word and deed of such a life is 
well-pleasing in his Heavenly Father's sight. 
Thus the person who has grown up 
through faithful doing of the right into 
loving devotion to the good, finds every 
place a holy place, every bush upon the 
roadside ablaze with God, every circum- 
stance where duty can be done and good 
can be accomplished, a gateway to heaven, 
an approach to the throne of the Most 
High. He sees God because his heart is 
pure; he has abundant communion with 
him because he has some measure of that 
participation in his holy purposes wherein 
alone true spiritual communion is found. 



22 God's Education of Man 

Belief in God is something no logician 
can argue into us, no apologist can prove ; 
any more than by arguing the logician can 
satisfy our hunger if we have no food, or 
the apologist can assuage our thirst if we 
refuse to drink the water that he offers. 
The bread and the water of the spiritual 
life are the doing of one's duty and the 
service of our fellows ; and without these 
elements one can never have the life of 
fellowship with God, of which they are the 
indispensable constituents. 

Faith in a living God, in other words, 
must be wrought out of our own moral and 
spiritual experience. The man who gains 
it in that way, by doing his work as a mem- 
ber of a great spiritual order, and serving 
his fellow-men as members of the same 
great kingdom of which he is himself a 
part, comes to know God with the same 
certainty that the fish knows the water, 
the bird the air, or any living being the en- 
vironment in which it lives and moves and 
has its being. Live and move in the con- 



The Ethical Basis of Christianity 23 

scious and practical recognition of the holy 
Will that includes every right act of yours, 
and rebukes every wrong act ; and you can- 
not long remain unaware of the divine 
presence. Serve a good that is as real in 
your neighbor as in yourself, and infinitely 
transcends you both, and out of your ser- 
vice will be developed the glad and glorious 
assurance that the universe is a place 
where good can be and ought to be the 
aim of every will that inhabits it, and is the 
final purpose of its beneficent Creator. 

Doubt in our day has had many a de- 
famer, and many a eulogist. The eulogies 
and the defamations are often equally wide 
of the mark. We must discriminate two 
kinds of doubt : the passive and the active. 
Passive doubt is weak and contemptible. 
It folds its listless hands, sits idly down, 
and waits for some evidence or other to 
come along and prove to it the existence of 
a God and the probability of a hereafter. 
It is high time to tell such passive doubt- 
ers in plain terms : " There is no God who 



24 God's Education of Man 

will ever deign to disclose himself to lazy 
souls like you. No heaven-bound chariot 
will ever stop by the wayside to pick up 
such worthless tramps." To the man who 
has no moral earnestness within him, there 
is no possible means of ever discovering 
a God without; to the man who has no 
spiritual life in his own soul there is no 
place where eternal life is gratuitously dis- 
pensed. This lazy doubt which boasts its 
own emptiness, and expects to be fed like 
a tramp on the crumbs of other people's 
faith, has had much more respectable treat- 
ment in these days than it deserves. The 
sooner we drive these spiritual tramps from 
our doorsteps, and starve them into honest 
seekers after moral and spiritual work, 
the better it will be for them. To those 
who have nothing, nothing shall be given. 
Those who lack the moral purpose are in- 
capable of spiritual faith. 

The other and nobler sort of doubt is 
worthy of all encouragement. To those 
who are working hard to do the right and 



The Ethical Basis of Christianity 25 

make the world the better for their pre- 
sence, let us be quick to say : " You are 
already in the kingdom of heaven, though 
perhaps you know it not. You are a child 
of God ; for you could not live and work 
as you do unless there were within you a 
latent consciousness that the spiritual world 
is one, that good is its aim, and that the 
source of its oneness and its goodness is 
akin to the reason and righteousness that 
struggles for expression in your own moral 
and spiritual life. You have in your own 
souls the stuff that faith in God is made 
of. Hold it fast, cling to it, however small 
and faint and feeble it may be. For unto 
every one that hath the moral purpose shall 
be given the spiritual life, and he shall have 
abundance of the peace and blessedness of 
God." 



26 God's Education of Man 

II 

Christ the Historic Revelation of the Universal 
Will of God 

If this is the main thing, is it not the 
only thing ? No. The one thing needful 
is not the only thing. Foundation is not 
structure. The oil requires the confining 
lamp, the conducting wick. The sap must 
have supporting fibre. Blood must be sus- 
tained by bone and tissue. The nucleus 
must have the enveloping protoplasm to 
make the cell complete. The error of con- 
servative orthodoxy has been to confound 
nucleus and protoplasm, blood and bone, oil 
and lamp, foundation and structure, in one 
mechanical aggregate; and then to say, 
"Take all or nothing." The error of liber- 
alism is its mechanical separation between 
the principle and its embodiment, and the 
tendency to dispense with important fea- 
tures of the latter altogether. Between the 
mechanical aggregate of essentials and non- 
essentials offered by the orthodox, and the 



Christ the Historic Revelation of God 2j 

mechanical dissection of essentials from 
nonessentials offered by the liberals, Chris- 
tian faith is purchasing either the semblance 
of vitality at the expense of rationality, or 
a barren rationality at the expense of vital- 
ity. It requires reorganization, a restate- 
ment in which the vital principle shall at the 
same time be distinguished from and united 
with its historic and social embodiments. 

This vital principle is, as we have seen, 
the disposition to do the will of God. A 
will, however, must have an organ. A soul 
must have a body. This will to do the will 
of God must have the historic, social, and 
material equipment wherewith to make it- 
self effective in the actual world of men 
and things. Such a body for its soul, such 
an organ for its will, liberal Christianity 
lacks to-day ; just as traditional orthodoxy 
comes perilously near to lacking a soul for 
the body of doctrine it preserves. 

An effective spiritual and social move- 
ment must have a human head, a personal 
Lord, a real Master. Such a Lord and 



28 God's Education of Man 

Master the Christian finds in Christ. In 
his life and teaching, in his character and 
career, the will of God, conceived as love 
to every man according to his capacity and 
needs, first came to adequate personal self- 
expression in human history. We can 
distinguish, but we cannot separate the 
movement from the man, the art from the 
master, the life from the soul that lives it. 
The man or the church that presumes to 
separate the doing of the will of God from 
loyalty to the person of Jesus Christ is sure 
to become as barren and amateurish as the 
novice in any art or science who ventures 
to disregard the best that has been done 
before him, and to set up on his own ac- 
count. For man or church, the measure 
of devotion and love and worship to Jesus 
Christ is the accurate and infallible measure 
of practical power, not perhaps in enter- 
taining the aesthetic sensibilities of the cul- 
tivated few, but certainly in moulding and 
transforming the character and conduct of 
the plain masses of mankind. For it is in 



Christ the Historic Revelation of God 29 

the form of the concrete and the personal 
that the moral and spiritual makes its only 
effective appeal to human hearts and lives. 
When Jesus Christ is thus accepted as 
the historic human embodiment and revela- 
tion of the will of God, it is the most natural 
thing in the world to identify him with the 
will which he embodies, and to worship him 
as divine. Contact with a perfect conductor 
is contact with the battery itself. Lines 
parallel to the same straight line are parallel 
to each other. The printed book and the 
mind of its author are not merely like each 
other, but of the same nature. Likewise if 
God be to us, not the problematic product of 
some far-fetched speculation concerning the 
ultimate origin of the cosmic process, but 
the manifest presence of a holy will work- 
ing for the righteousness and blessedness 
of man ; and if Christ is to us the historic 
bearer, and supreme personal expression, 
and ultimate spiritual interpreter, of that 
blessed will of God, — then to call this man 
Jesus less than divine, or quarrel with his 



SO God's Education of Man 

title Son of God, is to empty the very name 
of God of all the historic associations and 
concrete content that give it worth and 
make it worshipful. To deny divinity to 
Christ is to relegate all divinity whatsoever 
to the far-off shadowy realms of metaphysi- 
cal inquiry. If the flesh and blood of the 
man whose meat and drink it was to do the 
will of God be not divine, then the days of 
faith in a living God are numbered, and the 
feet of the agnostic are at the door to carry 
out the corpse. 

The modern argument for the divinity of 
Christ is very simple : Love is God. Christ 
is our highest and completest historic ex- 
pression of love. Therefore Christ is the 
Son of God, our Interpreter of the Divine, 
our vision of the Father. As Rev. Theo- 
dore C. Williams has happily expressed it : 

" God gave the world his Son ; and he was known 
For God's own Son, because he took the throne 
Of perfect Love, that seeketh not her own ; 
And freely giving, as to him was given, 
Made Love on earth commune with Love in heaven." 



The Holy Spirit, God in Humanity 31 

III 

The Holy Spirit, God in humanity. The doctrine 
of the Trinity the unessential formulation, of 
essential truths 

If now the living will of God applied to 
human life is the aspect of the divine with 
which we men are chiefly concerned, and if 
Jesus Christ is divine by virtue of the origi- 
nality and power with which he made that 
will of God present and effective in human 
history, one more kindred insight is inevi- 
table. In so far as ordinary men and women 
do this same will of God to-day, they too 
become thereby partakers of the divine na- 
ture and the Spirit of God dwelleth in them. 
And here again, the Spirit of God, the Holy 
Spirit, dwelling in devout and humble, 
though frail and imperfect human hearts, 
is not merely like God, similar to the divine, 
but is God, is of the same nature with the 
divine. Approached from this point of view, 
the divinity of the Holy Spirit is as self- 
evident and obvious as the divinity of Christ 



32 God's Education of Man 

himself. Both insights are essential to any 
apprehension whatsoever of God in the 
only terms intelligible and helpful to us ; in 
terms, that is, of our humanity. 

I would not attempt to force these doc- 
trines of the divinity of the Son and the Holy 
Spirit on any man. To the natural man 
they are unintelligible mysteries. When 
set up as independent propositions, they are 
meaningless or self-contradictory. On the 
other hand, they develop themselves out of 
experience in doing the will of God. For 
no man can strive earnestly and deeply to 
do the loving will of God, without gaining 
thereby an ever-increasing reverence for 
the divine character of the Christ who 
revealed the fullness of that loving will as 
a world-transforming spiritual power, and 
the divine quality of the Spirit in the hearts 
of all our fellows who have caught from 
Christ the enthusiasm for the life of right- 
eousness and love. 

Whether we put these insights together 
and label the product the doctrine of the 



The Doctrine of the Trinity 33 

Trinity is a minor matter. The writers of 
the New Testament did not find it neces- 
sary, though in the early development of 
the church, the fathers found it expedient 
so to do. The divinity of the Son and of 
the Spirit, however, are so vitally involved 
in the belief in an immanent divine will, 
that it is impossible logically to think out 
or to live out belief in the will of a divine 
Father without including in it, as its inev- 
itable corollaries, belief in a divine Son and 
Spirit. Hence, as the first step in the re- 
organization of our faith, was the recognition 
of the presence of a divine will in human 
affairs as the primal and central fact, so 
the second and third steps must be the 
recognition of the divinity of the Christ who 
revealed that will in its fullness to the 
world, and of the Spirit in the hearts of his 
followers, making that will a growing and 
deepening power in the world to-day. And 
these are steps which the orthodox no less 
than the liberal churches need to take. For 
neither orthodox nor liberal has to any extent 



34 God's Education of Man 

grasped this insight. The orthodox has the 
name of it ; but in traditional, unreasoned, 
and practically unintelligible form. The 
liberal, on the other hand, often gets an 
approximation of these truths in the form 
of a vague semi-pantheistic deification of 
humanity : but he has no definite crystalli- 
zation of affection around a divine historic 
person ; no adequate expression for the in- 
finite and eternal difference between the 
life that is impelled by nature and the life 
that is inspired by the Spirit. It will be 
an immense gain to both parties, and a pos- 
sible bond of union between them, when 
the presence of the will of God in human 
life is accepted as the primal spiritual prin- 
ciple; and when the divinity of Christ 
who introduced, and the Spirit who propa- 
gates the divine will in human life are 
accepted as the obvious corollaries of that 
primal principle. 

The moment these truths are lost sight 
of, the possibility of a theological interpre- 
tation of life is gone. To try to construct 



The Doctrine of the Trinity 35 

a theology without them is to impose upon 
one's self the ancient task of making bricks 
without straw. As a matter of fact, in con- 
sequence of our lost grip on these truths, 
we have no theology to-day. What passes 
for such in orthodox circles is a mixture of 
scholasticism and mysticism ; and so-called 
liberal theology is a medley of metaphysics 
and sociology. The one is the ghost of a 
theology that has long been dead ; the other 
is the embryo of a theology that is waiting 
to be born. Start, on the contrary, with a 
clear faith in a living God, historically re- 
vealed in Christ, and socially present in the 
Spirit of Christian life to-day, and all other 
doctrines of religion follow as logically and 
inevitably as a geometrical demonstration. 
Only the merest outline of such a deduction 
can be presented here. 



36 God's Education of Man 

IV 
Sin and Atonement 
If there is a holy will embracing all 
human life, if the principle of that will has 
been revealed in the life and character of 
Christ, if the practice of that will is going 
on to-day in the hearts and lives of all 
who have Christ's Spirit, then all that 
falls short of that will, all that is incon- 
sistent with that character of Christ, all 
that is unresponsive to that Spirit, is sin. 
And since no man by nature rises spontane- 
ously to the high and holy level of that 
divine will, that Christlike character, that 
spiritual life, it follows that all have sinned 
and come short of the glory of God. Sin 
is original; that is to say, it is not due 
to any special and peculiar perversity of 
the individual, but results from his partici- 
pation in a human nature which, by virtue 
of its animal inheritance and natural con- 
stitution, as a matter of course seeks pri- 
marily its own good, regardless of how that 



Sin and Atonement 37 

individual good of his may clash with the 
good of others, and obstruct that progres- 
sive good of all men, which is the will of 
God. This original sin into which all the 
children of Adam, or, in other words, all 
members of the human race have fallen, 
and of which by virtue of their physical and 
psychological constitution they all partake, 
deepens into guilt and individual responsi- 
bility just as soon as it comes to stand in 
conscious contrast to the larger good which 
the will of God, the character of Christ, the 
life of the Spirit, represent. The moment 
the light of this larger life shines upon a 
selfish soul, the darkness of the merely 
natural life of selfishness is thereby con- 
demned ; and persistence in it thereafter 
gives rise to guilt and condemnation. 

Conversion from sin takes place when 
first the larger life of love, rooted in God, 
revealed in Christ, and diffused through the 
Spirit in the lives of those about us, appeals 
to us as preferable to the continued life of 
selfishness and sin. As soon as one has 



j8 God's Education of Man 

experienced this great change from doing 
his own selfish will to doing the will of God, 
he hates sin, both in himself and in others, 
as he never hated it before. For he now 
sees it as an offense against the loving will 
of God, which he is trying to do, a wrong 
against his fellow-men, whom he is trying 
to serve. 

The man who hates sin is sure to get 
himself hated by sinners ; by the men, that 
is, who persist in doing the mean and cruel 
and loathsome things which his new life 
opposes and condemns. In pride and self- 
defense these evil-doers will do him all the 
harm they can. At the same time the 
man who has thus been born into a new life 
of righteousness and love will feel more 
keenly than he could have felt before the 
pain and shame and wretchedness which 
wrongdoing brings on its innocent and help- 
less victims. Thus the man who makes 
the will of God his own finds heaped upon 
himself the double burden of the odium of 
sin and the mass of misery to the innocent 



Sin and Atonement 39 

as well as to the guilty, which sin carries in 
its train. Then he begins to understand 
why the Son of God had to be a man of 
sorrow ; why he had to suffer on the cross. 
He begins to see that the life of every man 
who does God's good will in a wicked world, 
and loves the poor sufferers whom the evil 
maltreat and hate, must be a life of sacrifice, 
and its prof oundest symbol must ever be a 
cross. Not until one knows what it is to 
fight corruption and cruelty and brutality 
and hypocrisy, to pity the poor victims of 
these wrongs, and to be criticised and ma- 
ligned and impoverished and persecuted for 
it, can he begin to appreciate the heroic 
sacrifice of Christ, who carried the fight 
for righteousness and purity and sincerity 
and love into the very camp of the scribes, 
Pharisees, chief priests, hypocrites, adul- 
terers, and extortioners ; and at the cost of 
his life then and there won for the world 
the eternal triumph of truth over lies, of 
right over wrong, of kindness over hardness, 
of purity over lust, of meekness over pride, 



40 God's Education of Man 

of love over hate, of good over evil. No- 
thing short of this experience of earnest 
service and unflinching sacrifice for the tri- 
umph of God's will and the good of man 
can interpret to us to-day the meaning of 
the sacrifice of Christ. Every man who has 
tried to do these things in any degree knows 
full well that there can be no salvation 
either from sin, or from the misery sin 
entails on guilty and innocent alike, save 
by the vicarious sacrifice of some brave, 
generous servant of righteousness and bene- 
factor of his fellows. The doctrine of 
atonement is self-evident to every man who 
ever fought intrenched and powerful evil, 
or sought to rescue the wicked from their 
wickedness and the wronged from their 
wretchedness. To those who have never 
touched that fearful burden of human sin 
and misery with so much as the tips of 
their dainty and critical fingers, the doctrine 
of vicarious suffering, like all the deeper 
truths of the spiritual life, must remain 
forever an unintelligible and impenetrable 
mystery. 



The Organisation of the Spiritual Life 41 



The Organization of the Spiritual Life. The 
Outlook for the Future 

This new life of service and sacrifice 
brought to the world by Christ, and begot- 
ten in us by the Spirit, at once demands a 
socially effective organization and expres- 
sion, that those who share this life may be 
bound closer together ; that the enthusiasm 
of it may be kept alive ; that the numbers 
who share it may be increased; and that 
those who are losing it may be brought to 
share its privileges and blessings. This 
organization must have officers and teach- 
ers ; times and places of meeting ; articles 
of agreement as to the principles of this 
better life; edifying literature to keep it 
ever before their minds ; dignified ceremo- 
nies to impress it periodically upon their 
hearts; established modes of communion 
with the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, 
whence the new life comes. Such an organi- 
zation is the church. Such a place is the 



42 God's Education of Man 

sanctuary. Such a time is the Sabbath. 
Such articles of agreement are the creeds. 
Such officers are ministers, priests, deacons. 
Such a literature is the Bible and the Book 
of Common Prayer and the collection of 
sacred hymns. Such ceremonies are the 
order of worship. Such modes of com- 
munion are the sacraments, and public and 
private prayer. The form of none of these 
things is sacred or essential in itself. It 
matters little whether the day be the first 
or the seventh of the week; whether the 
Lord's Supper be observed with bread and 
wine, or with bread and water, or with bread 
alone ; whether baptism be with little water 
or with much; whether prayer be stereo- 
typed or extemporaneous ; whether the pas- 
tor be dressed as a layman or robed as a 
priest ; whether the creed be old or mod- 
ern ; whether the Bible be regarded as one 
book inspired alike throughout, or many 
books of varying degrees of inspiration; 
whether the church is called by one or 
another of a hundred different names. If 



The Outlook for the Future 43 

church and priest, and creed and rite, and 
book and voice, and house and hour, bind 
men together to do the will of God, and 
walk in the way of Christ, and live the life 
of the Spirit, then they are all holy, sacred, 
God-ordained, — not by any mysterious spell 
inherent in themselves or handed down by 
apostolical succession, but simply because 
they are useful and efficient agencies through 
which the will of God, the grace of Christ, 
the peace and power of the Spirit, gain en- 
trance to the hearts and lives of regenerated 
men, and go forth to conquer and redeem 
the world. 

Faith in the Father, the Son, and the 
Spirit makes the problem of the future 
clear. If the love of God be no other than 
that which suffered in the Son rather than 
that the world should be left in darkness 
and sin, no other than that love which 
yearns to-day in the hearts of countless 
fathers and mothers for their children, of 
pastors and teachers for their people and 
pupils, of lovers and friends for those dear 



'44 God's Education of Man 

to them, of reformers and philanthropists 
for those who have gone far astray, then we 
may be sure that no soul can share God's 
blessed eternity on any lower terms than 
glad and generous participation in God's 
life of love, in the sacrificial service of Christ, 
in the devoted life of the Spirit. We have 
also the best possible grounds of assurance 
that every soul that does enter here and 
now into the divine life of love, into the 
service of Christ, into the fellowship of the 
Spirit, will not be suffered to drop into 
nothingness, but will be raised with Christ, 
in the power of the Spirit, to a blessed 
immortality. 

The reorganized faith of the future will 
not be such a very different faith from the 
faith of the fathers. Some excrescences 
will have to be lopped off, or allowed to 
drop by their own dead weight under the 
gentle influence of time. Taken one by 
one, its articles will correspond pretty closely 
to the articles of the traditional orthodox 
creed. Yet they will be rooted in a central 



Tloe Outlook for the Future 45 

spiritual insight ; bound together by logical 
relations in a rational order of subordina- 
tion, instead of being tied mechanically 
together in a promiscuous bundle by the 
tight cords of blind tradition and unverified 
authority. 

Current orthodoxy in its present unor- 
ganized form cannot hold its own under the 
searching light which the twentieth century 
is sure to flash upon it. Current liberalism, 
with its inorganic protest against ortho- 
doxy, has a still briefer lease of life. Our 
faith, whether it be of the orthodox or of 
the liberal type, must be reorganized. In 
that reorganization the simple doing of the 
will of God, as that will has been historically 
revealed in Christ and is socially embodied 
in the Spirit in which Christian people live 
to-day, must be the centre of which all other 
doctrines are the circumference; the oil 
that gives the light of life, to which all 
Scriptures and churches and sacraments 
are but the wick and lamp ; the life-blood 
of religion, to which all creeds and rites and 



46 God's Education of Man 

professions are but the bony framework 
that sustains the beating heart of love and 
loyalty within. 

VI 

The Present Need of Theological Construction. 
The Function of Dogma 

It is doubtless occasion for congratulation 
that all the systems of theology constructed 
previous to the general acceptance of the 
doctrine of evolution, and the universal dif- 
fusion of the results of historical and Bibli- 
cal criticism, have " had their day and ceased 
to be." Evolution and criticism have given 
us a larger world, and the system of thought 
that is to express this enlarged world must 
be vastly more complex and capacious than 
any of the systems that went before. Sys- 
tem of some sort, however, we must have, 
if practical life is to be wisely directed and 
pure emotion is to be permanently sustained. 
If there is a God ; if there has been a reve- 
lation of his will in history and of his nature 
in humanity ; if there is a person worthy to 



Present Need of Theological Construction 4y 

be called his Son, and a Spirit adequate to 
represent him in the world to-day ; if man, 
by nature the heir of the animal, is in spirit 
capable of becoming the child of God; if 
there are processes by which man can rise 
from the natural to the spiritual state, and 
gain assurance of divine favor — then it must 
be possible to render some intelligible ac- 
count of these facts and processes, and to 
set forth these truths in rational relation 
and systematic form. 

This doctrinal duty our churches are fail- 
ing to fulfill to-day. There is no accepted 
body of doctrine, clear-cut, well reasoned, 
consistently and comprehensively thought 
out, which you can count upon hearing 
when you enter a Christian church. In an 
informal discussion at a club, where men 
of widely different views were expressing 
themselves with great freedom, a mill agent, 
a man of unusual keenness and intelligence, 
a member of a Congregational church, de- 
scribed what is actually given out in many 
of our churches as " debris floating in dish- 
water." 



48 God's Education of Man 

The fault is not exclusively or chiefly 
with the ministers. Our mode of selecting 
ministers, while it tests a man's rhetoric 
and elocution, and whether he has a 
taking way with the young people, gives 
little or no means of ascertaining whether 
he has a reasoned and organic body of truth 
to communicate or not. Furthermore, we 
have no recognized centres or agencies 
through which such a positive body of doc- 
trine is being effectively disseminated. 
There are a few individual writers here and 
there who give some evidence that they 
have thought things through to a conclu- 
sion ; but they are too much engrossed with 
practical cares to give more than glimpses 
of their doctrine to the public. There are 
colleges and seminaries which teach philoso- 
phy and theology ; but a theological profes- 
sor of large experience remarked recently 
that he knew of only two colleges which 
give their students a point of view which 
has any significance for theology ; and the 
professors of theology are too new in their 



Present Need of Theological Construction 49 

places, or have too few pupils under them, 
to have made upon the churches as a whole 
the impression of a " school," with charac- 
teristic and positive convictions. There are 
excellent publications which contain excel- 
lent articles ; but, since the unfortunate 
discontinuance of the "Andover Review," 
we have not had a publication devoted 
to fundamental theological problems which 
can be counted on to give a definite, con- 
sistent, consecutive presentation of a posi- 
tive point of view. Whether the doctrines 
advocated in that review were sound or 
unsound, helpful or harmful, is a matter on 
which there is honest difference of opinion, 
and which it is not necessary to discuss. 
It did give an able presentation of certain 
views, and it did provoke able criticism of 
those views, and both the statement and 
the criticism were of great service to the 
development of thoughtfulness on these 
great themes. 

The fashion nowadays to decry and depre- 
ciate dogma is the most silly and foolish of 



$o God's Education of Man 

the many fads of the hour. If we give way 
to it we shall soon or late be compelled to 
substitute second-hand ecclesiastical hear- 
say, in fantastic garb and unctuous intona- 
tion, for personal insight into the laws and 
personal possession of the motives of wise 
and noble living. 

Dogma is to religion what astronomy is 
to the stars, what botany is to flowers. We 
do not consider it sufficient to simply gaze 
at the stars and smell the sweet odor of the 
flowers. The astronomer breaks up the 
starlight with his lenses and gives us a doc- 
trine of their motions and their chemical 
constitution, which is a very different thing 
from what the plain man gets by simple 
star-gazing. It is the science of astronomy. 
The botanist cruelly pulls the lovely flower 
to pieces and gives you in place of the beau- 
tiful and fragrant whole a name and a place 
in a system of classification. It is the sci- 
ence of botany. And yet there are men 
who have no quarrel with either astronomer 
or botanist, who nevertheless raise a great 



The Function of Dogma 5/ 

hue and cry the moment you begin to ana- 
lyze God's attributes and attitude toward 
man, and to break up man into his elemental 
passions and pull apart the springs of 
motive in his soul. They complain that in 
place of the living God and breathing man 
you are giving them mere dead dogmas and 
inanimate abstractions. To be sure, you 
are. You are doing for God and man pre- 
cisely what the astronomer does for the 
stars, precisely what the botanist does for 
the flower. You are aiming to be scientific ; 
you are applying the tool of science, which 
is analysis, to the revelation of God and to 
the soul of man. It may be a cold, cruel 
thing to do. It may be that the product is 
not so beautiful as is the living whole with 
which we start. But it is just as necessary 
and just as useful in the one case as in the 
other. If any man in this late day wishes 
to go up and down the earth decrying sci- 
ence, he is welcome to the task, though he 
will get scant hearing for his pains. Let him 
not, however, pose as the friend and advo- 



52 God's Education of Man 

cate of science in every other department of 
knowledge, and then when it comes to the 
subject of man in his relation to God decry 
the scientific method of logical analysis, and 
dogma, which is its inevitable product. 
You can get star-gazing without spectrum 
analysis. You can get the bloom and fra- 
grance of the rose without a compound 
microscope. You can get sweet, sentimen- 
tal experiences of piety without logic and 
dogma. In all other departments, however, 
the world has agreed that the shallow, sen- 
timental first impression is not enough. If 
we are to save religion from the intellectual 
contempt into which it is fast falling under 
the influence of this superficial sentimental- 
ism, we must subject man in his relation to 
God to a rigorous analysis ; we must throw 
out one by one upon the screen of logic the 
component elements of the divine nature ; 
we must lay side by side upon the table the 
sepals and petals and stamens and pistils of 
man's dissected soul. 
" Ah ! " my unscientific, sentimental friend 



The Function of Dogma 55 

objects, "you forget what wretched, false, 
grotesque work men have made of it when 
they have tried to subject the idea of God 
to logical analysis and draw up man's nature 
and destiny in terms of dogma." No, I do 
not forget. There has been a great deal of 
false and pernicious dogma in the world, I 
must admit. But theology is no exception. 
The Ptolemaic astronomy taught many 
erroneous notions. Shall we therefore decry 
astronomy as a whole and revert to simple 
star-gazing ? The Linnaean system of botan- 
ical classification was arbitrary, fantastic, 
and misleading. Shall we therefore assume 
in advance that Gray and Goodale have 
nothing to tell us which it is worth our 
while to hear ? Augustine and Calvin and 
Edwards doubtless made mistakes. But 
does it follow that there is nothing for us 
to do to-day but settle down in self-compla- 
cent ignorance and trust that man is on the 
whole a very good being, or if he is n't, a 
good God will bring him out all right in the 
sweet by and by? The man that takes 



54 God's Education of Man 

this indolent attitude becomes thereby intel- 
lectually side-tracked, and erelong will find 
that the train of earnest thinking has moved 
on and left him standing generations behind 
the times. 

If one is ever tempted to indulge in this 
superficial depreciation of dogma, let him 
remember that therein he is parting with 
his intellectual birthright, which is a def- 
inite, scientific grasp of the principles of 
the spiritual life ; let him remember that for 
every such idle word of blasphemy against 
the holy name of science he shall give 
account at the bar of outraged reason for 
what comes perilously near to being the 
one unpardonable intellectual sin. 

It does not follow that dogma is to be 
preached, any more than it does that it 
would be wise for an astronomer to offer 
his diagrams and formulas to a visitor to 
his observatory as a substitute for the stars 
the visitor comes to see ; or that a botanist 
should give his guest a bouquet of technical 
names in place of flowers to look upon and 



The Function of Dogma 55 

smell. The preacher should know dogma 
as the scientist knows his formulae and 
nomenclature. He should be able to state 
in dogmatic terms what precise changes 
from lower to higher states of thought and 
feeling and volition his sermon is calculated 
to produce. 

The work of intellectual destruction has 
gone far enough. The immediate work 
before us now is not destructive, but con- 
structive. We no longer need the inspector 
to condemn, but the architect to plan. In 
view of the havoc which evolutionary and 
critical conceptions have wrought in the 
traditional beliefs, it is time to weld to- 
gether the truths we have saved from the 
wreck of the ancient systems and the truths 
that have been brought to us on the flood 
of these scientific and historical studies, 
into a definite, coherent, reasoned and rea- 
sonable body of doctrine, which will give 
the intelligible plan of life and authoritative 
guide to conduct, that, in the complexity of 
modern life, is more imperatively demanded 
to-day than it ever was before. 



CHAPTER I 
CONTROL BY LAW 



" Now this is the Law of the Jungle — as old and as true 

as the sky ; 
And the Wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the 

Wolf that shall break it must die. 

"As the creeper that girdles the tree-trunk the Law 

runneth forward and back — 
For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength 

of the Wolf is the Pack. 

" Ye may kill for yourselves, and your mates, and your 

cubs as they need, and ye can ; 
But kill not for pleasure of killing, and seven times never 

kill Man. 

" Now these are the Laws of the Jungle, and many and 

mighty are they ; 
But the head and the hoof of the Law and the haunch 

and the hump is — Obey ! " 

Kipling: The Second Jungle Book. 



CHAPTER I 

CONTROL BY LAW 
I 

Marts Primitive Innocence and Early Fall 
3AN is the offspring of the animal. 




Animal anatomy is wrought into 
his structure, animal blood flows 
in his veins, animal appetites and passions 
burn in his heart. The mere presence of 
these appetites and their normal indulgence, 
however, is not bad, but good. That is the 
element of ethical truth in the story of the 
Garden of Eden. Adam as God made him, 
man as he evolved from the animal, was 
innocent as the sheep upon the hillside, 
guileless as the baby in his mother's arms. 
This goodness of primitive man was 
maintained by natural selection and per- 
petuated through instinct For at this 
stage of development good conduct is con- 



60 God's Education of Man 

duct which promotes, bad conduct is conduct 
which hinders, nutrition and reproduction. 
Hence primitive man could not go far astray. 
For natural selection with its stern law, 
"The soul that sinneth shall die," was 
always close at his heels to smite the too 
wayward individual and wipe out the too 
offensive tribe. He was good because the 
few points of conduct with which he was 
consciously concerned were so fundamental 
that if he were bad at these points he would 
die and leave no offspring. 

This hereditary and instinctive innocence, 
however, could not last long. For when 
man's wants multiply, and his life becomes 
more complex, when simultaneous alterna- 
tives compete in his consciousness, or, in 
the pictorial language of Oriental antiquity, 
when he begins to " eat of the fruit of the 
tree of the knowledge of good and evil," 
then comes a "fall." As long as the im- 
mediate instincts of nutrition and reproduc- 
tion were his main concerns, man could 
scarcely fail to observe the two great laws 



Man's Innocence and Fall 61 

of life, which bade him, " Eat freely of the 
fruit of every tree in the garden, and of the 
meat of fish and fowl and cattle ; " and, 
"Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish 
the earth." When, however, he comes to 
have many points of contact with nature, 
and with other men, then he may be well 
adjusted to his environment on some sides, 
ill adjusted on other sides ; and still escape 
the clutches of natural selection. By vir- 
tue of his points of good adjustment he 
can continue to live and reproduce in spite 
of his points of bad adjustment. Through 
this loophole the toleration of moral evil 
came into the world. Through this entan- 
glement with the many-sided complexity of 
man's nature, moral evil is able to maintain 
its standing in the world in defiance of the 
law of natural selection. An indignant pub- 
lic sentiment would exterminate to-day a 
wholly bad man as unceremoniously as nat- 
ural selection did in days gone by. When 
man had but few vital points of contact 
with his environment, he was either almost 



62 God's Education of Man 

wholly good or almost wholly bad accord- 
ing to the prevailing standards of conduct 
and conditions of survival, and consequently 
the good survived and the bad perished. 
Now all men are partly good and partly 
bad; the good and the bad struggle for 
supremacy within man himself; "both 
wheat and tares grow together until the 
harvest." The best man among us is aware 
of many a point where his adjustment falls 
far short of perfection; and the worst re- 
probate in our slums, or among our idle 
aristocracy, has many a point which binds 
him to the necessities or affections of his 
comrades and helps him to maintain his 
hold on life. This has been so admirably 
set forth by John Fiske in his recent book, 
"Through Nature to God," that I give his 
words at length. 

"If an individual antelope falls below 
the average of the herd in speed, he is sure 
to become food for lions, and thus the high 
average of speed in the herd is maintained 
by natural selection. But if an individual 



Man's Innocence and Fall 63 

man becomes a drunkard, though his capa- 
bilities be ever so much curtailed by this 
vice, yet the variety of human faculty fur- 
nishes so many hooks with which to keep 
one's hold upon life that he may sin long 
and flagrantly without perishing. There 
is thus a wide interval between the highest 
and lowest degrees of completeness in living 
that are compatible with maintenance of 
life. Mankind has so many other qualities 
beside the bad ones, which enable it to 
subsist and achieve progress in spite of 
them, that natural selection — which always 
works through death — cannot come into 
play. Now it is because of this interval 
between the highest and lowest degrees of 
completeness of living that are compatible 
with the mere maintenance of life, that 
men can be distinguished as morally bad or 
morally good. In inferior animals, where 
there is no such interval, there is no devel- 
oped morality or conscience, though in a 
few of the higher ones there are the germs 
of these things. Morality comes upon the 



64 God's Education of Man 

scene when there is an alternative offered 
of leading better lives or worse lives. Moral 
evil is simply the characteristic of the lower 
state of living as looked at from the higher 
state. Its existence is purely relative, yet 
it is profoundly real, and in a process of 
perpetual spiritual evolution its presence in 
some hideous form throughout a long series 
of upward stages is indispensable. Its 
absence would mean stagnation, quiescence, 
unprogressiveness." 

This doctrine of the primitive goodness 
of our first ancestor, " who was and was not 
man," and of the inevitable shortcoming of 
every son of this evolutionary Adam, is our 
modern way of stating what Paul and Au- 
gustine and Calvin and Kant call the " fall," 
and the consequent total depravity, and ori- 
ginal sin, and radical badness of the race. 
Stated in their terms it perchance provokes 
our scorn and wrath. Yet, stated in these 
words of our foremost American exponent 
of the doctrine of evolution, it is so trans- 
parently reasonable, and logically inevitable, 



The Universality of Law 65 

that we may safely accept it as the starting- 
point of our account of the moral nature of 
man and God's education of him. 

II 

The Universality of Law. The Unique Char- 
acter of Hebrew Legislation 

Although natural selection soon ceases 
to be man's only moral spur, it gives rise to 
its successor. For by weeding out exam- 
ples of bad conduct, and leaving the better 
to survive, it tends to make examples of 
the better conduct more numerous. Imita- 
tion seizes on these better examples, which 
natural selection crowns with survival, and 
hardens them into custom. Every tribe 
as it advances toward civilization develops 
customs ; and customs are the parents of 
laws. 

Law is custom clothed with authority 
and sanctioned by popular acceptance. 
Though it is the long, slow work of the 
people to grind the winnowed grain of 
custom into the fine flour of law, its final 



66 God's Education of Man 

codification is generally the achievement of 
some individual genius like Solon or Draco, 
Confucius or Moses. Law is universal and 
unescapable. Just as underneath the ver- 
dure and foliage of the mountain you find 
rock, and if you go far enough back of the 
rock in time, or deep enough underneath 
it in space, you find fire ; so underneath all 
experience lies the great ledge of law, and 
if you search deep or look far beneath and 
behind law, you find flaming and remorseless 
penalty. 

All laws which truly set forth the con- 
ditions of individual, tribal, and national 
well-being are ipso facto laws of the one 
God who rules the world in righteousness. 
Not every lawgiver or community, how- 
ever, recognized with equal explicitness this 
universal character of legislation. Unique 
among the ancient nations for the explicit- 
ness with which they attributed the laws 
of their nation to the one God of all the 
world, stand the Jews. Their God, more- 
over, was a living God ; not merely one 



Hebrew Legislation Unique 6y 

who had met Abraham by the oaks of 
Mamre, Jacob at Bethel, and Moses on 
Mount Sinai; but one who. continued to 
speak by the mouth of living prophets and 
to declare his will in progressive legislation. 
To be sure, by a harmless legal fiction, akin 
to that by which the changes demanded by 
the will of the English people are ascribed 
to the gracious condescension of the Crown, 
this progressive legislation was ascribed to 
the single historic lawgiver, Moses, who 
was represented as having received it com- 
pletely formulated once for all from the 
hand of the Lord. Nevertheless they had 
the two essential things : a developed sys- 
tem of legislation and the ascription of this 
legislation with substantial truth, though in 
fictitious and literary, rather than in scien- 
tific and historically accurate form, to the 
God who presided over their national des- 
tiny. 

There is an infinite difference between 
simply having customs, laws, and social 
standards, as Greeks and Romans and 



68 God's Education of Man 

every civilized people must have, and re- 
cognizing that these laws are the command- 
ments of the one God, who rules the world 
in righteousness. Without such a recogni- 
tion violation of the law may be regarded 
as vice or crime, folly or wickedness ; but 
it is not felt and known as sin. It is the 
great contribution of the Hebrew race, 
through their matchless prophets, psalm- 
ists, and lawgivers, to have identified the 
progressively unfolding social standard with 
the eternal will of God; and to have 
branded all wrong-doing, not merely with 
the social stigma of vice or the public pen- 
alty of crime, but with the deep-dyed stain 
of sin. 

" Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, 
And done that which is evil in thy sight," 

is not Buddhistic nor Confucian, not Greek 
nor Roman, but a characteristic Hebrew ut- 
terance. From this point of view, murder 
and licentiousness are not merely violations 
of hallowed ancestral customs, or illusions 
of sense and passion, as Asia taught ; nor 



Hebrew Legislation Unique 69 

offenses against the harmony of nature and 
the stability of society, as early Europe 
declared ; nor simply relics of a lower so- 
cial order carried over into a more developed 
condition to which they do not apply, as 
modern evolutionary ethics proclaims ; nor 
miscalculations of happiness, as utilitarian- 
ism affirms. All these points of view have 
their measure of truth; but deeper than 
all, and when rightly conceived, including 
them all, is the great lesson which God 
taught the world through the Hebrew race, 
and which he has since reviewed in the 
form of Puritanism, that there is one holy 
will including all reality, and therefore ap- 
proving or condemning every thought, word 
and deed of each individual soul. It was 
that insight which, in spite of all their 
faults, made Israel a peculiar people, chosen 
of God to be the bearers of his special 
revelation. Because this point of view is 
inculcated with a clearness and concrete- 
ness to be found nowhere else, the writ- 
ings of Hebrew psalmists and prophets and 



jo God's Education of Man 

legislators have a unique and imperishable 
worth, are rightly regarded as Holy Scrip- 
tures and are made the basis of religious 
worship in the church to-day. For they 
contain God's first great lesson, that each 
man, at each moment of his life, either is 
the obedient servant of the holy will of 
God that seeks impartial good, and is there- 
fore the object of divine approval ; or else 
he is a disobedient, selfish, and obstreperous 
rebel against that holy will, and therefore 
is under divine condemnation. 

The Jews became the religious leaders 
of the race because they identified the 
moral standard of their race and day with 
the will of the living God, and measured 
their acceptance with God by their fidelity 
in fulfilling its requirements. We are their 
worthy successors, we learn aright the first 
great lesson that was taught through them 
just in so far as we do the same. Only 
let us be clear what the same thing in our 
case is. The Jews took the standard of 
their day and their race as the will of God. 



Hebrew Legislation Unique yi 

We must take, not the standard of their 
day and race, but of our day and race, or, 
since we are practically cosmopolitan, we 
must take the highest standard of conduct 
that the world has come to recognize, and 
say to ourselves : " This moral standard is 
for us the will of God. Just in so far as 
we are faithful to that we are acceptable to 
God. In whatsoever respect we fall short 
of that, we fall under the condemnation of 
God." For God wills the impartial and 
universal good. The moral standard of a 
race or age consists of the precepts and 
practices by which men have actually found 
that the public good is most effectively pro- 
moted. The standard is never perfect ; and 
when we have done all that it requires, we 
must count ourselves in many respects as 
unprofitable servants. For as the circle is 
greater than any of its constituent arcs, the 
universal will of God infinitely transcends 
the precepts and practices of any particular 
race or age. 



72 God's Education of Man 

III 

Ceremonial Elements in the Law. The Ritu- 
alism that is Idolatry 

The law, like the Ten Commandments, 
which is the great type of all legislation, 
includes both ceremonial and moral ele- 
ments. A school, in addition to the les- 
sons which are to be learned, has certain 
rules and requirements which are not them- 
selves lessons, but ways and means for the 
harmonious and successful conduct of the 
school while the lessons are being learned. 
So in God's school, there are times, like 
the Sabbath and holy week ; forms of wor- 
ship, like reading the Scriptures, prayer, 
and singing; rites, like the Lord's Supper 
and baptism, which, while not directly in- 
creasing the social welfare, are essential 
conditions of that habitual and systematic 
communion of man with God on which the 
life of social righteousness and service de- 
pends. 

The nature of these religious ceremonies 



Ceremonial Elements in the Law 73 

changes with the development of culture 
and reflection. Symbols appealing to the 
coarser senses of taste and smell tend to be 
superseded by the finer symbols which ap- 
peal to eye and ear. The sensuous ele- 
ment tends to fall away, leaving striking 
color and sound and the motions of the 
body and processions of men more and 
more in the background, and bringing more 
and more into prominence the written and 
spoken word. Still, this process cannot 
be hurried without loss. There are races, 
and classes in all races, and individuals in 
all classes, who still need more sensuous 
and striking symbolism than the spoken 
word of Quaker or Congregationalist af- 
fords. It is only when the symbol and the 
ceremonial becomes an end in itself, when 
the ordering of worship loses the sense of 
its proportion and relation to the practical 
life of righteousness, that we have the ritu- 
alism that is idolatry, and the clericalism 
that is hypocrisy or superstition. These 
evils, when they arise, however, are among 



74 God's Education of Man 

the worst curses that afflict the world. For 
under the pretense, or it may be with hon- 
est but deluded purpose of manifesting God 
to men, they hide from them that holy 
will, which is the only God the heirs of 
Hebrew tradition and the disciples of Christ 
can consistently worship and serve. 

IV 

TJie Law concerned chiefly with Right Rela- 
tions betweeti Persons 
The great bulk of the law and a con- 
stantly increasing proportion of it must be 
directed toward the establishment of right 
relations between the individual and his 
fellows. Even in ancient Israel, to do 
justly and to love mercy were inseparable 
from the injunction to walk humbly with 
God. The "law of commandments con- 
tained in ordinances " was subordinate to the 
law of right relations between man and man. 
The Mosaic legislation included regard for 
the fatherless and the widow, the training 
of children, consideration for the poor, 



Right Personal Relations J$ 

loyalty to the national government, pride 
in the national history, devotion to the 
national capital, responsibility of rulers and 
judges, land tenure and family life, just 
balances, leniency toward debtors, dutiful- 
ness to parents, kindliness to neighbors, 
the mitigation of the conditions of slavery, 
and the evils of polygamy and divorce ; as 
well as specific prohibitions of murder, 
false witness, theft, adultery, and covetous- 
ness. In the words of Canon Fremantle, 
"The law through which the nature of 
God was made known to Israel was the 
series of moral and political principles 
which established and maintained true rela- 
tions among the people." 

Such is the first great lesson taught in 
God's school. Man naturally judges his 
appetites and passions by the standard of 
his petty individual aims. Law brings in a 
universal standard. Law judges aets good 
according as they promote, bad in so far 
as they hinder, that universal good, which, 
viewed in detail, is the harmonious relation 



y6 God's Education of Man 

of man to his environment ; viewed com- 
prehensively, is the will of God. 

V 

Gratification of Appetite in itself a Good. 
Specious Excuses for Sin 

The life of appetite in itself, uncontested 
with custom and law, viewed apart from 
its conflict with the rights and interests of 
others, unjudged by the social standard, 
expressed in the immediate, unreflecting 
way in which it is expressed by the normal, 
unsophisticated animal, is good. Other con- 
siderations being left out of account, appe- 
tite in process of gratification is better than 
appetite thwarted or repressed. 

If the drunkard were merely a throat 
and stomach, and nothing more ; if the act 
of drinking stood apart by itself ; if all con- 
sequences could be cut off ; if work, family, 
friends and society could be disregarded 
and left out of the account, then we should 
all have to admit that the moistened throat 
and stimulated stomach, diffusing a thrill 



Gratification of Appetite jj 

of vitality, cheer, comfort and well-being 
through the whole sympathetic system of 
the nerves, and welling up into the con- 
sciousness of supreme self-satisfaction, is 
vastly more to be desired and more to be 
approved than the parched dryness of the 
throat, the aching void in the stomach and 
the depressed nervous tone and generally 
dissatisfied state of mind of the man who 
wants to drink whiskey and refrains. If 
man were merely sexual and nothing more, 
then on that side gratification under all 
conditions would be a good to be sought 
and repression an evil to be shunned. If 
man were merely a cunningly devised ma- 
chine for acquiring property, and nothing 
more; if he had no consciousness of the 
rights of his fellows and was incapable of 
representing to himself the wrong which 
fraud and spoliation inflict on others, then 
every dollar that by hook or crook he could 
get into his wallet would be a blessing, and 
every dollar that was taken out in justice 
or in charity would be a loss. If man were 



7# God's Education of Man 

conscious of himself alone as personal and 
of others as mere things, then every stir- 
ring of pride and vanity, every deed of mal- 
ice and cruelty, since they would heighten 
his estimation of his own importance and 
power, would be a glory to him, and every 
touch of modesty or pity would be a weak- 
ness and a shame. 

Now most of the specious excuses that 
weak and wicked men offer for their vices 
and crimes are based on this half truth. 
They apply to themselves, living as they do 
in a social system, under a social standard 
and in full consciousness of their social 
responsibilities, what would be true if they 
were mere bundles of isolated appetites and 
passions, out of relations to their fellows, 
and to the social order of which, for better 
or for worse, they form an inseparable part. 
The drunkard and the libertine proclaim, if 
not in so many words, yet by the tone of 
conversation into which they fall in the 
"freemasonry of the smoking-room," that 
these favorite modes of self-indulgence and 



Specious Excuses for Sin yg 

self-assertion are perfectly "natural." So 
they are. Blind natural impulse undoubt- 
edly prompts them. Man, however, is more 
than "natural." To say of a man that his 
conduct in this sense is "perfectly natural" 
is only another way of saying that it is sim- 
ply brutal. 

There is no vice so contemptible, no 
crime so cruel, no sin so heinous, as not 
to be susceptible of defense on the ground 
that the raw impulse, the "natural" appe- 
tite, the isolated desire which led to it was 
honestly inherited from our animal ancestry 
or legitimately acquired in the process of 
human evolution, and directed toward what 
in itself is a real good. All evil is misplaced 
good. But that does not prevent the mis- 
placement from being positively and inex- 
cusably bad. Sin puts the particular appe- 
tite before the total man; the individual 
man before the social whole. It is this 
sacrifice of the great to the petty that con- 
stitutes the meanness and exceeding sinful- 
ness of sin. Perhaps the most subtle and 



80 God's Education of Man 

dangerous poison that floats in our moral 
atmosphere to-day is the tendency of a 
widely read and much praised class of 
novels to offer this "natural" defense for 
sexual indulgence. 

VI 

Answer to the Excuse that Certain Sins are 
"Natural." The Meanness of Sin 
When men offer this "natural" excuse 
for unsocial conduct, as they have been 
prone to do ever since first the contrast 
between <£vo-is and vo/xos came to clear con- 
trast in Greece at the time of the Sophists, 
the answer is that which underlies Kant's 
famous maxims, " So act as if the maxim of 
thy action were by thy will to be made a uni- 
versal law;" and "treat humanity, whether 
in thyself or in another, ever as an end, 
never as mere means to thy own selfish 
ends." Ask the thief how he would like to 
live in a world in which everybody should 
steal. Ask the miser how he would like to 
live in a world in which every man was as 



Answer to Excuse that Sin is " Natural " 81 

mean and penurious as he. Ask the liber- 
tine how he would like to be the son of a 
mother, the husband of a wife, the father 
of a daughter, who should have the charac- 
ter and status his conduct tends to give the 
victims of his lust. Ask the corrupt poli- 
tician how he would like to live in a state 
in which everybody was trying to get a 
living at the expense of everybody else. 
What such a state would be is easy to ima- 
gine. Thomas Hobbes has given us a picture 
of it in chapter xiii. of the " Leviathan : " 
" Whatsoever, therefore, is consequent to a 
time of war, where every man is enemy to 
every man, the same is consequent to the 
time wherein men live without other secu- 
rity than what their own strength and then- 
own invention shall furnish them withal. 
In such condition there is no place for indus- 
try, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, 
and consequently no culture of the earth ; 
no navigation, nor use of the commodities 
that may be imported by the sea ; no com- 
modious building ; no instruments of moving 



82 God's Education of Man 

and removing such things as require much 
force; no knowledge of the face of the 
earth; no account of time; no arts; no 
letters ; no society ; and, which is worst of 
all, continual fear and danger of violent 
death ; and the life of man, solitary, poor, 
nasty, brutish, and short. The desires and 
other passions of man are in themselves no 
sin. No more are the actions that proceed 
from those passions, till they know a law 
that forbids them." 

All this sounds wonderfully like passages 
from Paul's Epistle to the Romans, wherein 
he declares, "They have all turned aside, 
they are together become unprofitable ; 
There is none that doeth good, no, not so 
much as one. Their feet are swift to shed 
blood ; destruction and misery are in their 
ways ; and the way of peace they have not 
known. For through the law cometh the 
knowledge of sin. But sin is not imputed 
when there is no law." 

Now no man wishes to live in such a state 
as either Hobbes or Paul describes. Yet 



The Meanness of Sin 83 

that is precisely the state of things which 
indulgence of natural appetite and selfish 
desire, unrestrained and unregulated by law, 
tend to produce. The natural man, were 
he in a state of nature, would be excusable. 
Sin is not imputed where there is no law. 
Or as we have said, appetite is not morally 
evil until it conflicts with some recognized 
superior good. No man in a civilized com- 
munity to-day, however, can be in a state of 
nature ; can avoid the recognition of the 
superior good ; can escape the social stand- 
ard ; can evade the law of God. Every man 
is reaping the benefits of that law of God, in 
the purity and perpetuity of the home into 
which he was born and in which he was 
reared. He is enjoying the fruits of it in 
the peace and order of society ; in the trust- 
worthiness of the tradesman with whom he 
deals and the workmen whom he employs ; 
in the kindliness and consideration and 
courtesy which are habitually shown him 
by his fellows. 

Hence the meanness of vice, the ingrati- 



84 God's Education of Man 

tude of sin, the baseness of lawless indul- 
gence of appetite. The immoral man is a 
hypocrite, a coward, an ingrate, a traitor to 
man, an enemy to God. For he is taking 
with one hand from his fellows the blessings 
of their integrity, and purity, and kindness ; 
and with the other hand he is giving back, 
in some sneaking, underhanded way, the 
curses of dishonesty, uncleanness, and cru- 
elty. If he could go off by himself and be 
a brute among brutes, indulge his beastli- 
ness among the beasts, then his degradation 
would be his own affair ; society would let 
him alone ; and, as nothing better would be 
given to him or expected of him, conscience 
would let him off without a twinge. But 
to act like a brute, and still to move among 
men ; to wallow with the beasts, and still 
to claim a home made sweet and pure by 
woman ; to conduct his business and his 
politics like a savage, and still to walk the 
streets and patronize the institutions which 
Christian people have made secure and 
sound : this receiving good and rendering 



The Responsibility of Wealth 85 

evil in return ; this living like a parasite on 
a social system out of which one is sucking 
the life-blood, — this in plain terms is what 
the immoral man amounts to ; this is pre- 
cisely what it means to be a sinner. 

The validity of moral law, the firm foun- 
dation of social responsibility for the good 
of others on which it rests, and the mean- 
ness of disregarding it become the more 
apparent the more concrete we make its 
application. Let us therefore take three of 
the more important aspects of every-day 
life, wealth, pleasure, and politics, and see 
what the moral law has to say with reference 
to them. In other words, let us measure 
conduct at these points by the searching 
standard of its remoter consequences for 
the total human happiness and welfare that 
is affected by it. 

VII 

The Responsibility of Wealth 
First, wealth. Do we realize how much 
of human life there is stored up in what we 



86 God's Education of Man 

eat and wear and spend and use ? Food 
and raiment, fire and light, shelter and rest, 
are bought for us by the exposure of the 
lone shepherd on the mountain-side, the 
weary weaver at her loom, the weather- 
beaten sailor before the mast, the engineer 
driving his train against the storm, the 
miner in the bowels of the earth, the woods- 
man in the depths of the forest, the fisher- 
man off the foggy banks, the ploughman in 
the monotonous furrow, the cook drudging 
in the kitchen, the washerwoman bending 
over the tub, and the countless host of 
artisans and teamsters and common laborers 
who form the broad, firm base on which our 
civilization rests. 

Because of this high human cost of ma- 
terial goods, all waste is wickedness, all 
ostentation is disgrace, all luxury that is not 
redeemed by uses to be explained later is 
criminal. The food or raiment that we 
waste is simply so much human toil and 
sacrifice which by our wastefulness we ren- 
der null and void. The wealth and state 



TJje Responsibility of Wealth 87 

we ostentatiously display simply show the 
world how much of the vitality of other 
men and women we burn up in order to 
keep our poor selves going. To boast of 
riches, to take pride in luxury, is as though 
an engine should boast of the quantity of 
coal it could consume, regardless of work 
accomplished ; as though a farm should be 
proud of the fertilizer spread upon it, re- 
gardless of the crop raised in return. What 
is the real nature of the idle rich ? Precisely 
what do they amount to in the world ? To 
eat the bread that other men have toiled 
to plant and reap and transport and cook 
and serve ; to wear the silk and woolen 
that other women have spun and woven 
and cut and sewed ; to lie in a couch that 
other hands have spread, and under a roof 
that other arms have reared ; not that alone, 
— for we all do as much, — but to consume 
these things upon themselves with no sense 
of gratitude and fellowship toward the toil- 
ing men and women who bring these gifts ; 
with no strenuous effort to give back to 



I 

88 God's Education of Man 

them something as valuable and precious 
as that which they have given to us : that 
is the meanness and selfishness and sin and 
shame of wealth that is idle and irrespon- 
sible. Against riches as such no sane man 
has a word to say. Against rich men who 
are idle and irresponsible, against rich women 
who are ungrateful and unserviceable, the 
moral insight cries out in righteous indigna- 
tion, and brands them as parasites, receiving 
all and giving nothing in return ; gulping 
down the life-blood of their fellows, without 
so much as a "thank you" in return. 

That brings us to the old question, Can 
a rich man enter the kingdom of heaven ? 
Assuredly, yes. All things are possible 
with God, and to right-minded men. It is 
indeed harder for a rich man than for a 
poor man, for obvious reasons. Being a 
Christian, or entering the kingdom of God, 
simply means that, instead of setting up 
ourselves and our possessions as ends in 
themselves, we shall make ourselves, and 
all we have, organic, functional, instrumen- 



The Responsibility of Wealth 89 

tal, serviceable to the great and glorious 
purposes of God for the welfare and bless- 
edness of men. The more we are and the 
more we have, the harder it is to bring 
ourselves and our possessions into this or- 
ganic and functional subordination to the 
will that makes for human happiness and 
social virtue. But just because it is so hard, 
therefore it is all the more glorious. The 
rich Christian is God's finest masterpiece 
in the world to-day. 

The man whose office is a pivot around 
which revolve in integrity and beneficence 
the wheels of industry and commerce, afford- 
ing employment and subsistence to thou- 
sands of his fellows; the woman whose 
home is a centre of generous hospitality, 
whence ceaseless streams of refinement and 
charity flow forth to bless the world ; the 
person whose leisure and culture and wealth 
and influence are devoted to the direction 
of forces, the solution of problems, the or- 
ganization of movements which require large 
expenditure of time and money — these men 



90 God's Education of Man 

and women who are at the same time rich 
and Christian, these are the salt of .our 
modern society ; by such comes the redemp- 
tion of the world ; of such, no less than of 
the Christian poor, is the kingdom of heaven. 
No honest man grudges these Christian rich 
their wealth. It matters not whether their 
income is five hundred or fifty thousand a 
year. The question is whether the little 
or the much is made organic to the glory 
of God and the good of humanity. The 
greater the amount of wealth thus organ- 
ized and utilized, the greater the glory and 
the larger the good. 

VIII 

Vie Test of Pleasure 
Second, pleasure. Pleasure is Nature's 
premium on healthy exercise of function. 
The more of it the better. There is no 
asceticism about the gospel of Jesus Christ, 
though his followers have often tried to 
tack it on. We all like pleasure, and are 
not ashamed to own it. Not suppression, 



The Test of Pleasure gi 

but fruition, is the ideal of our nature. The 
modern world agrees with Beecher when 
he says, "My conception of religion is to 
let every faculty effulge, touched with celes- 
tial fire." The Son of man came eating 
and drinking and rejoicing, and shedding 
joy and gladness wherever he went. And 
the man who catches his spirit will find his 
own life more and more full of happiness. 
And I mean by that, real, live, human hap- 
piness ; not the pale, sickly counterfeit that 
lights up the countenances of emaciated 
hermits and psalm-singing pietists. What- 
ever ministers to the exaltation of body or 
of mind, whatever stirs the blood, quickens 
the pulses and thrills the nerves, is so far 
forth a good to be desired. There is not 
a bad appetite or passion in our nature, 
unless perversion makes it so. Our bodies 
are good, and every physiological function 
is good, and the pleasure that comes of it 
a thing to be rejoiced in as the seal of vigor 
and vitality. Our minds are good, and all 
the joys of mental exercise are glorious wit- 



g2 God's Education of Man 

nesses to the divine image in which we are 
made. Our heart's loves are good, and the 
tender ties that bind us together in families 
and friendships and mutual affections are 
the best gifts of God to men. 

There is, however, one condition of all 
noble pleasure. We may not buy it with 
the life-blood of our fellows ; we may not 
purchase it at the cost of human degrada- 
tion. The attempt to regulate pleasure 
and amusement by special rules is mischiev- 
ous and futile. The attitude of many good 
people toward cards and billiards, the theatre 
and the dance, is a concession to the devil 
of things that are altogether too good for 
him to monopolize. All these and kindred 
things are good, provided we do not pay too 
high a price for them. When billiards or 
cards are used to undermine the foundations 
of honest industry in a fellow-man ; when 
they are used to make one man's gain con- 
ditioned on another's loss ; when they divert 
the wages of the breadwinner from the sup- 
port of his family to the till of the gambler 



The Test of Pleasure g$ 

or the saloon-keeper, then these things, 
innocent and beneficent in themselves, be- 
come heavy with the weight of human misery, 
black with the odium of human degradation. 

The beauty of the human form, and the 
charm of graceful movement, when wedded 
to expressive speech or entrancing song, 
are sources of the noblest and keenest of 
our delights. Against opera or drama no 
lover of his fellows has a word to say. 

When, however, for the spectacular em- 
bellishment of the performance, woman is 
asked to put off that modesty which is her 
robe and crown, when the accessories of 
the exhibition are such that we would be 
unwilling to have one dear to us take part 
in it, then we are buying our pleasure with 
the red blood of a human heart and the 
stained whiteness of a sister's soul, — a price 
no true man will let another pay to procure 
for him a passing pleasure. 

The real reason why a true-hearted, noble 
man cannot walk in the ways of licentious- 
ness is not the selfish fear of physical 



94 God's Education of Man 

contamination or social reprobation. It is 
because he cannot take pleasure in the 
banishment of a daughter from the house- 
hold of her father; in the infamy of one 
who might have been a pure sister in a 
happy home ; in the degradation of one who 
ought to be a wife, proud of the love of 
a good man and happy in the sweet joys 
of motherhood. On this point our social 
standards are still barbarous and our moral 
insight undeveloped. The man who has 
eyes to see these things as they are ; the 
man who can realize the cost of shame and 
degradation to others which they involve; 
the man who can see this and still seek 
pleasure there, is a man whose moral affini- 
ties are with the bygone brutality of the 
Roman populace that found delight in see- 
ing gladiators die ; with the slave-drivers 
who forced human beings to labor with the 
lash. I care not how high such a man may 
stand in social circles. He is a man with 
a cold, hard, cruel, callous heart ; a creature 
capable of finding a beastly satisfaction in 
drinking human blood. 



The Test of Pleasure 95 

Can pleasure, then, like riches, be re- 
deemed, and made an acceptable offering 
to the Lord ? Is there a heaven for the 
pleasure-seeker and the pleasure-giver, as 
well as for the rich ? Most certainly. Nor- 
mal pleasure is the counterpart of healthy 
function, and blesses the giver no less than 
the recipient. The practice of any worthy 
art is ennobling, and gives more pleasure 
to the artist than to the looker-on. The 
actor, the singer, the painter, the poet, is 
not degraded, but uplifted, by the joy he 
gives. When we sail the seas or explore 
the wilderness, we make the skipper or the 
guide the sharer of our joys. And so with 
all the pure domestic and social pleasures 
that enrich the life of man. The test is so 
simple and clear that a fool cannot miss it ; 
though a knave may. Is the act that gives 
you pleasure, all things considered and in 
the long run, counting all the costs and con- 
sequences, at the same time a source of 
permanent pleasure and well-being to the 
other persons who are affected by it ? The 



$6 God's Education of Man 

pleasure that fulfills this test is an acceptable 
offering to the Lord. All other pleasure is 
an abomination in his eyes. Searching and 
severe as this test is, there is not a particle 
of asceticism about it. It simply bids us 
do to others as we would that they should 
do to us, or to those whom we love best. 

IX 

The Moral Law in Politics 
Third, politics. Of all the freely flowing 
waters of our modern civilization, there is 
no portion which has been brought to us 
at such risk of life and cost of blood as 
our political liberties and civic institutions. 
From Marathon and Salamis, from the 
Netherlands under William the Silent, from 
the British sailors who fired the Spanish 
Armada, from Cromwell's Ironsides at Mar- 
ston Moor, from the Plains of Abraham, 
from Bunker Hill and Bennington, from 
Quebec and Saratoga, from Trenton and 
Yorktown, from Shiloh and Antietam, from 
Gettysburg and the Wilderness, from all 



The Moral Law in Politics 97 

the brave souls who have risked their lives 
for liberty and law, for justice and humanity, 
we receive to-day the blessings they bought 
us with their blood. 

The moral law, applied to politics, forbids 
us to receive our liberties and institutions 
as a mere matter of course, with no sense 
of gratitude to God and the brave men who 
gave them to us. It means that we use 
the greatness of our country as a means 
to our petty, private ends. It means that 
we seek for ourselves, or help secure for 
others, offices and emoluments for which 
we or they are unfit. It means that by 
our indifference or preoccupation with our 
private affairs we permit others to do what 
we would be ashamed to do ourselves. It 
means that we find it, on the whole, cheaper 
and more economical to endure a worse 
government and pay a heavier tax rather 
than bestir ourselves to do our part toward 
securing efficient administration and honest 
government. It means that we acquiesce 
in corruption in elections and favoritism in 



gS God's Education of Man 

appointments, and legislation by private 
purchase and irresponsible influence. 

Now we all tolerate a great deal of this 
wrong-doing ; because in times of peace and 
plenty the evil consequences of it are ob- 
scured. The taxes levied by public author- 
ity are a little heavier; the assessments 
imposed by party bosses are a little higher ; 
the streets are a little filthier; life and 
property are a little less secure ; the own- 
ers of franchises pay a little bigger divi- 
dends and the laborer pays a little more 
for his water and light and transportation ; 
disease is a little more contagious, and the 
death-rate a little higher. But these evils 
are distributed over such wide areas and 
such long periods, and fall on such vast 
multitudes of people, that the individual 
scarcely feels or notices his added share. 
Even a war department in time of peace 
and plenty may be administered on prin- 
ciples of personal patronage and private 
profit and political pull, and no great harm 
is manifest. It is, however, one of the 



The Moral Law in Politics 99 

few advantages of war that it puts men and 
principles to the test, and with its keen- 
edged sword cuts out their unrighteousness 
and rottenness so cleanly that all men may 
see and understand. Then we see what 
privilege and pull and spoils and incompe- 
tence mean, not in vague, general terms, 
but in terms of starvation and inefficiency 
and disease and death. It is a wholesome 
thing that, now our brief war with Spain 
is over, we have not a particle of animosity 
or resentment against the poor Spaniards 
who stood up at their posts and fired their 
bullets bravely at our breasts ; but that the 
men whom we find it hardest to forgive are 
those who failed to furnish our own brave 
soldiers at the front, or even in their camps, 
the reasonable requirements of health and 
healing, of vigor and efficiency. The men 
the nation blames most bitterly to-day are 
those who, when the lives and hopes of 
thousands of men and families, as well as 
the nation's fortune and honor, were in- 
trusted to them, had the audacity to hold 



too God's Education of Man 

these tremendous responsibilities in their 
hands, and then, to use the mildest term 
the whole vocabulary of whitewash affords, 
"failed to grasp the situation " in which the 
lives of these men and the fortunes of the 
nation by their authority were placed. 

If any great, lasting good shall come out 
of this late war, it will not be the speedy 
humiliation of Spain which every one fore- 
saw ; not the sudden acquisition of remote 
possessions which no one had anticipated : 
it will be the recognition of the truth that 
the man who puts himself, or helps to put 
others, into positions of public responsi- 
bility for which he or they are unfit, is 
guilty of the only form of treason a great 
republic has to fear. 

What, then, does the moral law require 
of us in politics ? It requires us to fit our- 
selves, and to hold ourselves in perpetual 
readiness, for the highest service to our 
country which we are capable of rendering ; 
and not to allow unfit men to crowd out 
their betters from the responsibilities of 



The Moral Law in Politics 101 

public service. Let each man, to the full 
extent of his ability and influence, do these 
two things, and he will do his part to solve 
the still unsolved problem of republics ; he 
will fulfill the requirements of the moral 
law in this important sphere. 

To be in a complex social system involves 
being in the relations which constitute that 
system. No man wishes to be out of the 
system. Hence no man can logically escape 
its obligations. They are binding upon 
him. Law is simply the formal and explicit 
declaration of that obligation of the indi- 
vidual to fulfill the relations which consti- 
tute the social system in which he is, and 
desires to be. It tells man that it is not 
decent to partake of benefits toward which 
he is not willing to make his individual 
contribution ; that it is outrageous to take 
those benefits openly and publicly, and then 
in secret and sneaking ways, to destroy the 
very principles on which those public and 
social benefits depend. 

To judge all indulgence of appetite and 



102 God's Education of Man 

passion, all business and political and social 
life, all cherished purposes and all unspoken 
thoughts not by the relative standards of 
the individual's physical or pecuniary or 
social interest, but by the standard of that 
universal good which is the will of God, 
has therefore as its first effect the con- 
demnation of sin, and the revelation to the 
sinner of his sinfulness and shame. 



Tfie Pride of the Pharisee and the Conceit of the 
Perfectionist. T7ie Inadequacy of Law 

There are, however, people who fancy 
that they keep this law of God, and con- 
sider themselves " unco guid," because for- 
sooth they have "not violated any known 
law." The Pharisees in the time of Jesus, 
the perfectionists of our time, are famil- 
iar examples of this delusion. Puritanism 
tended to the manufacture of this type, as 
one of its by-products. Wherever law is 
regarded as ultimate, and the human good 
at which law aims is lost sight of, this cold, 



The Pride of the Pharisee 105 

conceited caricature of righteousness is sure 
to set itself up and pose as the genuine 
reality. Of all the monstrosities that mis- 
directed and short-sighted spiritual effort 
has produced, this self-righteousness of a 
loveless legalism is the most repellant. Peo- 
ple of this type commit, perhaps, few overt 
acts of flagrant indiscretion ; but they rise 
to no lofty heights of heroic righteousness. 
They manage to keep their precious souls 
just out of the hell of social reprobation 
they are afraid of ; but they never come in 
sight of the shining battlements of the 
heaven. They may not cheat you ; but you 
must not expect them to make a costly 
sacrifice on your behalf. They may not 
get drunk; but their homes are not so 
happy that their children and neighbors 
find it preferable to the saloon. They may 
not commit adultery, or risk the scandal 
of a divorce ; but marriage is not to them 
a sacrament of self-devotion. They may 
not tell many lies ; but they seldom speak 
the truth with gentleness, or refrain from 



io4 God's Education of Man 

peddling scandal out of thoughtfulness and 
kindly consideration. They may not break 
the Sabbath ; but no one who has to spend 
it with them likes to see the dreadful day 
come around. They may not swear them- 
selves ; but they are so prim and punctilious 
in their propriety that they make the people 
who see them want to. They are just as 
good as trying not to be bad can make 
them. But there is no freshness or spon- 
taneity in their cut-and-dried conformities. 

For these and kindred reasons no strong, 
brave, generous, original spirit was ever 
content to remain long in this primary 
school condition. Socrates drank the hem- 
lock rather than endure it. Jesus chose 
the cross in preference. Paul, who had 
large experience of it, cast it behind him as 
a childish thing ; and was willing to endure 
no end of stripes and imprisonments, perils 
and persecutions, that he might save Jew 
and Gentile from its intolerable bondage. 
Luther went to the very verge of moral 
heresy with his " Pecca fortiter " to escape 



The Inadequacy of Law 105 

it. Browning takes the ground that the 
overt act is less disastrous to strength and 
worth of character than the cowardly respec- 
tability of a soul that sets its heart on a sin 
it lacks the energy to execute : — 

" The sin I impute to each frustrate ghost 
Is the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin, 
Though the end in view were a vice, I say." 

George Meredith protests : — 

" I am not one of those miserable males 
Who sniff at vice, and daring not to snap, 
Do therefore hope for Heaven." 

Kipling, most virile and unconventional of 
moderns, shows the same supreme con- 
tempt for those second-hand, imitative neu- 
trals, neither saints nor sinners, whose 
character is a mere veneer, imposed upon 
them from without : — 

" And Tomlinson took up his tale and told of his good 

in life. 
* This I have read in a book,' he said, and ' that was 

told to me, 
And this I have thought that another man thought of a 

Prince in Muscovy.' 



106 God's Education of Man 

The good souls flocked like homing doves and bade 

them clear the path, 
And Peter twirled the jangling keys in weariness and 

wrath. 
* Ye have read, ye have heard, ye have thought,' he said, 

• and the tale is yet to run : 
By the worth of the body that once ye had, give answer 

what ha' ye done ? 
Oh none may reach by hired speech of neighbor, priest, 

or kin, 
Through borrowed deed to God's good meed that lies so 

fair within. 
Get hence, get hence to the Lord of Wrong, for doom 

has yet to run, 
And . . . the faith ye share with Berkeley Square up- 
hold you, Tomlinson.' " 

But his sin turns out to be of the same 
borrowed, imitative, school-boy character, 
and the Devil scorns to admit him to Hell : 

"And he said, 'Go husk this whimpering thief that 

comes in the guise of a man : 
Winnow him out 'twixt star and star and sieve his 

proper worth.' " 

Whereupon his servants report, — 

44 ' The soul that he got from God he has bartered clean 
away. 



The Inadequacy of Law loy 

We have threshed a stook of print and book, and win- 
nowed a chattering wind, 

And many a soul wherefrom he stole, but his we cannot 
find: 

We have handled him, we have dandled him, we have 
seared him to the bone, 

And sure, if tooth and nail show truth, he has no soul 
of his own.' " 

The merely imitative man, the pupil 
trained exclusively under the law, the copy- 
ist of the social standard, who is that and 
nothing more, has no soul of his own, no 
original righteousness, no forceful character, 
no filial reproduction of the divine nature. 
At the worst he is an incorrigible slave ; at 
the best he is a conceited and unprofitable 
servant. He is the self-centred, unchari- 
table elder brother of the parable. 

Man is born with a simple, natural, 
instinctive goodness, which, in contrast and 
competition with the higher forms of good 
which the increasing complexity of develop- 
ing society forces upon his attention in the 
form of law, becomes bad. Even the keep- 
ing of the law for the sake of keeping it, 



io8 God's Education of Man 

even if it were possible, would fail to make 
him good. For goodness is the identifica- 
tion of the individual with all the personal 
and social interests that are represented in 
his consciousness, and are affected by his 
action. It is the reproduction of the life of 
the organic whole in the mind and heart 
of the individual member. Goodness in 
this deep, organic, vital sense, law cannot 
produce. The best it can do is to restrain 
the more flagrant outbursts of evil. 

Every son of Adam, or in modern termi- 
nology, every member of the human race, 
who shares its animal heredity, has within 
him elements of evil which, by the very con- 
stitution of his nature, inevitably ripen into 
selfishness and sin. For when his will first 
emerges it finds itself the servant, not of the 
universal social order for which it cares 
nothing, but of its own animal appetites 
and individual passions which are clamoring 
for satisfaction. Psychology, sociology, and 
experience alike attest the fact that in us 
all animal wants and egoistic desires get 



The Inadequacy of Law top 

the inside track and the first send-off in 
the long race for supremacy, which is the 
moral and spiritual history of man. God's 
first lesson then is that man is a sinner. 
Not that appetite is bad. In the animal, 
thanks to the simplicity of its consciousness 
and to the results of natural selection, appe- 
tite is good. In man it becomes bad when 
it clashes with a greater known good of 
self, or others, or of society. Law brings 
home that knowledge of a greater good, 
and the violation of the law is sin. All 
men sin; and all men are under condem- 
nation. The man who fancies he has kept 
the whole law of God, and prides himself 
upon it, merely shows how incapable he is 
of appreciating the infinite breadth of ser- 
vice and depth of sympathy the real keep- 
ing of the divine law would involve. Man 
naturally wants to have his own way and 
gratify his own desires regardless of what it 
costs in misery to others, injury to society, 
insult to God. Law says to him, " Thou 
shalt not do the mean and selfish thing thy 



no God's Education of Man 

animal nature prompts. If thou sinnest 
thou shalt suffer the remorse of conscience, 
the contempt of thy fellows, the condemna- 
tion of God." 

Reluctantly, and through constraint, man 
compromises on a perfunctory and half- 
hearted obedience. To escape the penalty 
he obeys the law ; to silence conscience 
he keeps the commandments ; to maintain 
his respectability he conforms to the social 
standard. Conformity without character, 
prudence without principle, respectability 
without integrity, is all mere law can 
do for man. It is the negative aspect of 
righteousness ; the primary school stage of 
Christian character. It is a powerful deter- 
rent from the grosser forms of evil ; but 
for the positive promotion of the freer and 
nobler forms of goodness we must look to 
a more gracious dispensation ; we must be 
born again. 



CHAPTER II 
CONVERSION BY GRACE 



11 That is the doctrine, simple, ancient, true ; 
Such is life's trial, as old earth smiles and knows. 
If you loved only what were worth your love, 
Love were clear gain, and wholly well for you : 
Make the low nature better by your throes ! 
Give earth yourself, go up for gain above ! " 

Robert Browning : James Lee's Wife. 




CHAPTER II 

CONVERSION BY GRACE 

I 

The Priority of Grace. Its Various Manifesta- 
tions 
J~AW tells us what we shall and shall 
not do to others. Grace tells us 
what others have done for us ; and 
in turn suggests how we should feel toward 
them. Law enforces conduct in the interest 
of others on the reluctant will of the indi- 
vidual. It can compel outward conformity ; 
it can shut up the guilty soul in a sense of 
condemnation ; it sometimes puffs up with 
pride the Pharisee or perfectionist who 
fancies he has kept it. It cannot change 
the heart, or renew the mind, or emanci- 
pate the will, or save the soul. Conversion 
is the work of grace. 

Grace is prior to law. In figurative 



/ j 4 God's Education of Man 

language, "the Lamb was slain from the 
foundation of the world." Yet inasmuch as 
responsibility for our own action is the first 
thing impressed upon us we become aware 
of law long before we become aware of the 
influences of grace. Or, to state the same 
thing in terms of the definitions given above, 
we know what we must do and must not 
do, long before we reflect on what has been 
done for us and the response we ought to 
make. The child thinks of his father as 
an authority restraining and punishing his 
naughtiness, long before with appropriate 
gratitude he recognizes him as the provider 
of the necessities and comforts of his life. 
The scholar thinks of the school as the 
restricter of his liberty long before he comes 
to appreciate it as the liberator of his intel- 
ligence. Both in the individual and the 
race the thought of what we owe to others 
in return for what others have done for us, 
is a comparatively late and mature reflec- 
tion ; and when it comes marks the dawn 
of a new disposition in the individual, a 
new dispensation for the race. 



Various Manifestations of Grace 115 

When Socrates refused to break the laws 
of Athens, on the ground that he owed his 
existence and training and protection and 
liberty to them, he became the prophet of 
a new dispensation of grace to the Greeks, 
although he did not call the new principle 
he represented by that name. Whenever 
in nation or individual there dawns the sense 
that the natural and moral order of which 
we are members is good and beneficent, 
the source of countless blessings which we 
have individually done nothing to deserve ; 
and in response we are touched with grati- 
tude and reverence and loyalty, then we 
pass from the exclusive domain of law into 
the higher, freer, nobler realm of grace. 
The dawning of this recognition of the 
goodness without us is, at the same time, 
the beginning of an altogether new prin- 
ciple of righteousness within us. When I 
do or refrain from doing something, not 
because the law outside me says I must, 
but because gratitude and loyalty within me 
say I ought, then I have passed from bond- 






/ 1 6 God's Education of Man 

age to liberty, from law to grace, from dead 
works to a living faith. 

Grace, like law, is no abstraction, speak- 
ing to us in ghostly whispers from the 
clouds. It is concrete and personal. Just 
as law speaks through the customs and 
institutions of society, the stoutly asserted 
claims of our fellows, and the sharp sting of 
remorse and penalty which we feel when we 
violate an obligation or wrong a fellow-man : 
so grace speaks to us through the devoted 
toil of the father and the gentle patience of 
the mother in our days of helpless child- 
hood. Grace speaks to us in all the benefi- 
cent protection which society, with its offi- 
cers and institutions, affords to us, before 
we have thought of rendering any service to 
it in return. Grace speaks to us in the ser- 
vices and sacrifices of all good and great 
men who, in days gone by, have labored to 
build up the institutions and preserve the 
liberties and hand down the privileges which 
we enjoy. Grace speaks to us in the labor 
of all teachers who have revealed the truth 



Various Manifestations of Grace uy 

so that we could see it ; in the loyalty of all 
soldiers who have fought that a free and 
united country might be ours : in all mar- 
tyrs and missionaries who have lived and 
died that the knowledge of the larger and 
better life of love might not be withheld 
from the remotest corners of the earth. 

The supreme historical representative of 
grace, the one who brought it to the world 
and established it as the authentic revela- 
tion of the heart of God, is Jesus Christ. 
There are three degrees of the manifesta- 
tion of grace, and in them all Jesus, both 
in precept and practice, stands preeminent. 
All service freely rendered to others with- 
out hope of reward is a manifestation of 
grace. He who feeds the hungry, gives a 
cup of cold water to the thirsty, visits the 
prisoner, heals the sick, teaches the igno- 
rant, entertains the stranger, nurses the 
wounded, comforts the mourner, reproves 
the erring, or does the least act of kindness 
to the little child, becomes thereby and to 
that extent an incarnation of the grace of 



u8 God's Education of Man 

God. The fact that Jesus centred his 
own life in this principle, and taught the 
world to find in it the source and centre of 
its life, is his first claim to be accepted as 
the Messiah, and welcomed as an authentic 
revelation and incarnation of the essential 
life of God. 

The next higher form of grace is kindness 
and forgiveness to those who have wronged 
us. For then grace bears a double burden ; 
the service freely given to another, and the 
evil that other one has done to us. Here 
again Jesus stands out supreme in history 
as the one who made practically effective 
in a considerable body of men the precept, 
" Love your enemies, and pray for them 
that persecute you," and in the hour of his 
own supreme agony was able to intercede 
in behalf of his executioners, " Father, for- 
give them, for they know not what they 
do." 



Vicarious Sacrifice 119 

11 

Vicarious Sacrifice. The Sacrifice and the 
Forgiveness of Christ. How to bring Sin- 
ners to Repentance 

The profoundest manifestation of grace, 
however, is not in gratuitous service to 
others, nor yet in forgiveness of wrong 
done directly to ourselves ; but in that vi- 
carious sacrifice which makes the sins of 
others our own personal sorrow, and wrong 
done to others our own personal grievance. 
For the one thing that keeps earth from 
being a heaven is sin. To root out sin from 
the hearts and cut off so far as possible 
its consequences in the lives of men, is the 
one great deliverance for which the groan- 
ing and travailing world has been waiting 
through all its centuries of agony and an- 
guish, brutality and wrong. 

In the last chapter, we saw the essence 
of sin to be the gratification of some appe- 
tite, passion, or interest of the individual, 
good and innocent in itself, at the expense 



/ 20 God's Education of Man 

of some greater good to self, others, or 
society as a whole. We saw that this loss 
and injury to others is what makes sin the 
mean and shameful thing it is. Now this 
loss and injury which sin inevitably inflicts 
must fall on somebody. If it fell on no- 
body it would not be sin. The greater this 
injury inflicted on others, the greater be- 
comes the sin. When the sin of greed 
robs the widow and the orphan ; when the 
sin of lust tramples defenseless woman in 
the mire ; when the sins of the rich and 
powerful grind down the laborer and make 
him bear on his overburdened shoulders, 
in addition to the weight of his own heavy 
necessities, the load of lazy people's luxu- 
ries ; when the sin of the parasitic spoilsman 
fastens itself upon the state, and sucks the 
life-blood of a country, — then such sins 
ought to make every man who is guilty of 
them ashamed of his meanness and brutal- 
ity, his injustice and ingratitude. Yet so 
hard is the heart of man that the mere 
spectacle of the direct and inevitable con- 



Vicarious Sacrifice 121 

sequences of sin on its weak and helpless 
victims has never been sufficient to restrain 
the cruelty and lust and corruption that are 
making such awful havoc in human hearts 
and homes and states. 

It is not until some one who has the keen 
eye to see these evils as their poor down- 
trodden victims cannot see them ; some one 
who has the heart to feel them as too often 
the dull hearts of the sufferers cannot feel ; 
some one who has the courage to say to 
the prosperous and respectable sinners, 
" Inasmuch as you wrong one of the least 
of these poor victims, you wrong me, you 
wrong the Father, and grieve all men who 
have my spirit and the spirit of the Father 
in their hearts ; " some one who has the 
power to show all the world how loathsome 
and hideous and odious these sins of theirs 
are in the eyes of God and of all right- 
minded men ; not until some one with the 
most sensitive heart and most piercing 
moral insight, and most fearless courage, 
and most resolute readiness to be hated 



122 God 's Education of Man 

and sacrificed, steps in and makes the 
cause of the poor victims his own, and 
takes upon himself the enmity of those 
who are wronging them ; — not until then 
is sin likely to be seen and felt in its true 
enormity, not until then can its power 
over the hard hearts of men be conquered 
and cast out. 

A person who sees with perfect clearness 
the meanness and cruelty of sin, and makes 
the world see it and draw back from it in 
horror and shame ; a person who fights it 
with all his might, and does not shrink from 
the hardest blows that may fall upon himself 
in the battle against it, becomes thereby a 
messenger of God to men, a saviour of the 
world from sin, a reconciler of sinful man 
to the righteous Father. The world has 
seen many souls who have thus exposed, 
attacked, and temporarily routed the abuses 
and corruptions, the vices and sins, of their 
people and their age. Preeminent among 
such souls, supreme above them all for the 
clearness of his insight, the effectiveness 



The Sacrifice of Christ 123 

of his exposure, the bitterness of his fate, 
and the world-wide universality of the vic- 
tory he won, stands Jesus of Nazareth. 

Jesus found his people under an intoler- 
able yoke of ecclesiastical oppression. The 
chief priests formed a pontifical clique, an 
ecclesiastical ring. They controlled the 
temple, bestowed the patronage, elaborated 
the ritual, took their commissions out of 
its costly observances, and ran things in 
their own way for their own profit and ad- 
vantage. They were doing in the church 
precisely what the corrupt and unscrupulous 
political boss undertakes to do in the state 
to-day. Against the authority of these 
pontifical bosses, in opposition to the emol- 
uments of this sacerdotal ring, Jesus took 
the side of the misguided, oppressed masses 
of the plain and humble people. He 
cleared the temple of its dove-sellers and 
money-changers, substituted simple prayer 
for expensive merchandise as the condition 
of acceptance with the temple's God, and 
even foretold a time when the worship of 



/ 24 God's Education of Man 

the Father in spirit and in truth should 
supersede the temple service altogether. 
He taught plain, honest-hearted men and 
poor humble women that God was their 
Father and their Friend, and that he lis- 
tened more willingly to their heartfelt stam- 
merings of penitence than to the pompous 
rites of priests, or the boastful ceremonies 
of Pharisees. In the name of his Heavenly 
Father he freely bestowed forgiveness, re- 
cognition, blessing on repentant publicans 
and outcast sinners who would consent to 
sin no more. 

Of course, in claiming that his human 
forgiveness and grace and love was at the 
same time the forgiveness and grace and 
love of the Father, he was entirely discred- 
iting the tradition of a jealous and cruel 
tyrant ruling the world from beyond the 
clouds, who could be appeased by nothing 
short of the punctilious performance of 
these costly rites which the mercenary 
priests were manipulating to their own ad- 
vantage. 



The Sacrifice of Christ 125 

Therefore the chief priests envied him, 
and as the Gospel tells us, " For envy they 
delivered him up." Christ was the willing 
victim of the greed and hate of a corrupt 
priesthood, in order that he might be the 
deliverer of the plain people from oppression 
and extortion, from superstition and slavish 
fear. Had there been no corruption or 
oppression, no greed or pride, no supersti- 
tion or servility in the world, Christ's life 
would have been a glad and joyous one. 
He would have come to his own, to those 
who shared with him the blessings of the 
beatitudes ; and his own would have received 
him, and hailed him as the Lord and Mas- 
ter of the life they were striving to lead. 
Because he found avarice and pride and 
hypocrisy and lust and cruelty enthroned 
in the high places of the world, and dared 
to attack these abuses and corruptions in 
their stronghold in the temple at the na- 
tion's capital, therefore he brought upon 
himself all the wrath and malice and vindic- 
tiveness of exposed hypocrisy and thwarted 



126 God's Education of Man 

avarice and resisted tyranny. Because, like 
the true shepherd, he cared for the sheep, 
therefore he concentrated on himself the 
hatred of the hirelings and hypocrites who 
had been fleecing them. 

While Jesus resisted sin to the uttermost, 
exposing all its loathsomeness and cruelty 
and hypocrisy, and bravely bearing the 
worst its hate and malice could inflict, yet 
he ever showed the kindliest appreciation 
and readiest forgiveness to those who had 
been betrayed into it by appetite and pas- 
sion ; and who, when once they saw its 
meanness and cruelty, were willing to turn 
from it and repent. Deep insight into the 
nature of sin always makes one lenient 
toward those who have fallen into it una- 
wares. We all sympathize with the little 
boy who, when asked by his mother, " How 
could you do such a naughty thing ? " re- 
plied, "Easy, mamma, easy." For sin, as 
we have seen, is always the seeking of a 
good : the measure of its sinfulness consist- 
ing in the size of the larger good which the 



The Forgiveness of Christ i2j 

little good immediately sought displaces. 
Under the influence of appetite and passion, 
that larger good, which makes the gaining 
of the little good by comparison a loss, and 
therefore bad, ordinarily is seen but dimly ; 
often is not seen at all. Sexual sin, despite 
the fearful wretchedness and woe it visits 
on its victims, is nevertheless the misdi- 
rected activity of the profoundest, holiest, 
and most beneficent impulse of our nature. 
Hence, toward the sinner of this type, 
especially toward the woman whose too 
trusting nature had proved the occasion of 
her fall, Jesus could find no word of con- 
demnation ; though, in view of the fearful 
evils the sin itself entails, he sternly added, 
" Go and sin no more." With the publican, 
the type of the meanest of all our social 
parasites, the men who contrive, through 
public office and patronage and pull, to get 
a living which represents no equivalent 
service rendered in return, of whom the 
unscrupulous boss and spoilsman are the 
most conspicuous examples in our day, 



128 God's Education of Man 

Jesus was likewise on terms of friendly 
intimacy. Such men seldom realize that 
they are thieves and parasites, living at the 
expense of their more industrious and hon- 
est fellows. As a rule they are kind-hearted, 
good-natured fellows. Indeed, without these 
qualities they could not succeed at their 
polite variety of stealing. To be sure it is 
the business of all good citizens to make 
them realize what public nuisances and ne- 
farious rascals they are. But as long as 
they do not realize it, while we must uncom- 
promisingly condemn their actions, we must 
appreciate and welcome the many good 
qualities they have. By kindness and cour- 
tesy we shall win them to the better way 
sooner than by contumely and vituperation. 
The saloon-keeper is another example of a 
class of men with whom, were he with us 
to-day, Jesus would be on friendly terms ; 
though he would unsparingly denounce the 
abuses connected with his business. The 
saloon-keeper, as a rule, is a good-natured, 
lazy fellow, who proposes to live, at slight 



The Forgiveness of Christ 129 

cost of either capital or labor, on the fruits 
of other people's toil; but who does this 
in the most gracious and affable manner 
imaginable, and incidentally contributes not 
a little to the good cheer and comfort of 
the patrons who earn his living for him. 
If the saloon-keeper strictly and conscien- 
tiously limited his sales to what is con- 
sistent with the health and efficiency of 
his patron, and the proper support of his 
family, then his business would rank with 
other respectable forms of business, and he 
would be regarded by sane people as a 
public benefactor. The sin comes in when 
the saloon-keeper, as from the peculiar 
nature of the goods he deals in he is almost 
sure to do, stimulates consumption beyond 
that point, and thus becomes the injurer of 
the man, and the robber of his family. Yet 
as a matter of fact, in spite of all the talk 
of temperance people, few liquor dealers 
actually look at their business in that light. 
They see their business, not under the black 
shadow which disinterested philanthropic 



/ 30 God's Education of Man 

insight casts over it, but rather in the warm 
light which the merry good fellowship of 
their patrons reflects upon it ; and honestly 
deceive themselves into the belief that their 
business is legitimate, if not positively bene- 
ficent. These rather conspicuous and noto- 
rious examples from the publicans and 
sinners of our day may suffice to illustrate 
the central spiritual insight that all sin 
is committed under the guise of good ; 
and therefore that so long as the sinner is 
blinded by the light of that little good so 
that he cannot see the frightful shadow of 
the greater evils it involves, his sin is par- 
donable, and the sinner is to be forgiven 
and loved : even while we do our utmost to 
bring the sin itself out into the searching 
light of its remoter consequences, so that it 
shall stand condemned. 

Law considers acts, and their conse- 
quences for others. Grace considers the 
reaction of the act upon the heart of the 
man who does it. Law takes note of inten- 
tion. Grace considers motive. Now inten- 



The Forgiveness of Christ 131 

tion is often bad, while the motive is com- 
paratively good. To take a simple instance, 
when a small boy on Fourth of July morning 
puts a lighted cannon cracker into his neigh- 
bor's letter-box and blows it up, his inten- 
tion is to destroy the box and to inconven- 
ience his neighbor to that extent. Yet his 
motive is not malice ; but simply the com- 
paratively innocent desire to have some 
fun. With the mischief and naughtiness 
of young children we are all inclined to be 
lenient. We accept their proffered apology 
that they did not mean to bring about the 
precise unpleasant consequences of the 
pleasant deed they nevertheless fully in- 
tended to do. This same distinction be- 
tween motive and intention comes in to 
temper with mercy all judicious school and 
college discipline; though a pagan public 
often protests because a recompense of 
reward is not dealt out in full proportion to 
the largest intention and remotest conse- 
quences of the offense. Christ treated 
adults as children in spiritual discernment ; 



1 32 God's Education of Man 

and taught the world that the Father of us 
all draws the distinction between motive 
and intention in our acts ; and that as long 
as we do not deliberately cherish a bad 
motive in our heart, all the falls and lapses 
into which appetite and passion, habit and 
temptation may have led us, are fully and 
freely forgiven as often as we sincerely re- 
pent and seek to make amends. 

This uncompromising antagonism to sin, 
exposing it in all the blackness of its self- 
ishness and meanness, together with the 
most generous appreciation of all the good, 
and the freest forgiveness for all the re- 
pented evil, in the sinner himself, which 
Jesus introduced in its complete and final 
form to the world, is the only principle 
which can overcome sin in human hearts, 
and redeem the world from its blighting 
curse. Thus understood, it is obvious that 
"there is no other name given among men 
whereby we may be saved." For there 
is no other way whereby a person who, 
in seeking to gratify himself has wronged 



How to win Sinners 133 

others, can be brought to see how mean 
a thing he has done, and to be heartily 
ashamed of it ; and at the same time won 
over to a genuine admiration for the higher 
life, and an enthusiastic devotion to that 
larger good of others and of all which 
hitherto he has blindly disregarded and 
wantonly betrayed. 

This change which grace works in the 
sinner's heart is repentance. Take the 
saloon-keeper, for example. Law may force 
him out of the business by its penalties : 
but it cannot make him abandon it of his 
own accord. What can ? Suppose that a 
good man, by simple kindness and natural 
friendliness, wins the admiration and affec- 
tion of the saloon-keeper. Then, when he 
has won his confidence and devotion, let 
this good friend, in a quiet, confidential con- 
versation, show him how noble and beautiful 
it is to help make one's fellows happier and 
better ; what a fearful thing it is to be the 
occasion of their misery and degradation. 
Let him frankly refer to individual cases, if 



1 34 God's Education of Man 

there be such, among the patrons of this 
particular saloon, where the breadwinner is 
incapacitated, the wife is heart-broken, the 
children are impoverished, and the home is 
made wretched through the influence of 
drink. The man will see that continued 
friendship with this valued friend, and con- 
tinued prosecution of this business which 
he abominates, are incompatible. He must 
reject the friend, and turn his back on all 
the goodness the friend has brought into his 
life, — he must sin against the Holy Spirit, 
in other words ; or else he must get out of 
the business which in the light of this 
friend's character stands condemned. In 
such simple, direct, personal, friendly ways 
did Jesus deal with the sinners of his day : 
and not until Christian people rely more on 
grace and less on law; more on friendli- 
ness and less on force, will they make much 
impression upon the sinners of our time. 
So formal, forensic, hortatory, and institu- 
tional has our Christianity become, that we 
have almost forgotten the straightforward, 



How to win Sinners 135 

direct, personal method of Jesus. We talk 
about grace in the abstract, and attribute 
mysterious potency to its miraculous work- 
ing. But do we place our main reliance for 
changing the character of our fellows who 
have fallen into sensual and dishonest and 
cruel practices, and for relieving the world 
from the misery and woe these evil practices 
entail, on the simple power of a good, kind 
man over the heart of the wrongdoer whom 
the good man loves, and whose admiration 
and loyalty and confidence he wins and 
holds ? Not less personal than this was 
the grace of Christ. Nothing less personal 
than this same spirit of lovingkindness in 
the hearts of Christian men and women will 
do the work of grace to-day in redeeming 
the world from sin, and saving sinners from 
the evil of their wicked ways. 



i}6 God's Education of Man 

III 

Justification by Faith. Its Justice and Reason- 
ableness 

This response of the sinner to the gra- 
cious influence of the friend who at the 
same time loves him for what he is, and 
shows him how bad he is in order to help 
him to be better ; this yielding to the 
friend's good influence, this acceptance of 
the friend's ideal for him, this determination 
to renounce all that is inconsistent with it 
is what the New Testament calls faith. 
Nothing could be less like it than mere in- 
tellectual assent to a series of abstract 
propositions. When Jesus walked in Pales- 
tine, it was the personal response to his 
gracious personality. To-day it is the per- 
sonal response to the father or mother, 
pastor or teacher, friend or companion in 
whom the Spirit of Christ dwells. It may 
be awakened in the crowded meeting or 
through quiet conversation ; it may be ac- 
companied by true views of religious truth, 



Justification by Faith 13J 

or by views in large measure false ; or by 
no conscious recognition of intellectual truth 
at all ; it may be aroused by direct appeal, 
or induced by the silent example of one who 
knows not that virtue has gone out of his 
unostentatious life. In countless inexplica- 
ble ways the gracious Spirit of Christ in 
all pure, kind, generous hearts in which 
he takes up his abode goes forth to con- 
quer sin, and to convert the sinner from 
the error of his ways. 

If a man could at once become all that 
he desires to be; if the moment he ac- 
cepted a good man's friendship he could 
become all that the new relation demands, 
then this simple act of faith would be final ; 
he would have to pass through no interme- 
diate stage. This he cannot do. For he 
is soon brought up short against the expe- 
rience so forcibly set forth by Paul, — the 
impossibility of making the outward life an 
adequate expression of what, in the light 
of this new personal relation, he sincerely 
desires to be. Then comes despair, dis- 






138 God's Education of Man 

couragement, self-distrust. For the spirit- 
ual transformation required is something far 
deeper than going out of one avocation into 
another, or giving up this or that obviously 
bad habit. It is the radical reconstruction 
of character on a new principle ; the accept- 
ance of an altogether new personal standard 
of conduct and ideal of character ; and the 
bringing of words and deeds into conformity 
therewith. But the momentum of habit, 
the flowing tides of old associations, the 
prompting of ineradicable appetites and the 
clamor of long indulged imperious passions 
will continue to give vent in many a 
cross word and selfish act ; many an unhal- 
lowed thought and unholy motive ; many 
a bitter feeling and unprincipled ambition ; 
many a weak neglect of duty and timid 
shrinking from responsibility, utterly incon- 
sistent with the new life the gracious per- 
sonal influence has inspired. 

It is to persons in the midst of this bitter 
experience that the doctrine of "justifica- 
tion by faith" comes as a glad message of 



Justification by Faith Reasonable 139 

deliverance. To all such it says, "There 
is therefore now no condemnation to them 
that are in Christ Jesus." 

How righteous and reasonable such "jus- 
tification by faith " really is, a single glance 
will show. Here is a man who on the one 
hand is full of mean and mercenary aims, 
base and sensual passions, envious and hate- 
ful feelings ; who is constantly getting angry 
and saying unkind words and doing cruel 
things ; and who, in spite of all he can do, 
is unable to root out the bad appetites, 
choke down the envious feelings, rise above 
the base ambitions, keep under control his 
wrath. Yet on the other hand this man 
has felt the attraction of the life of perfect 
purity, and constant kindliness, and disin- 
terested service, and universal love, as, 
coming from God through Jesus Christ, it 
has been reproduced and reflected upon 
him by some Christian soul. In his inmost 
heart he desires to be the Christlike cha- 
racter which in another he admires and 
reverences and loves. Is there one of us 



/ 40 God's Education of Man 

who would have the heart to cast off or 
condemn a man of whom we knew the above 
description to be true ? Why, every one of 
us would welcome and honor such a man, 
in spite of all the witness of his evil deeds 
against him. The difficulty is that we can 
never know the heart of another ; can never 
see his hidden faith. But if we could see, 
if we could be assured that his affections 
were centred on the Christ the Christian 
friend had revealed to him, we should justify 
and acquit him of all his past misdeeds. 

Now God knows ; God sees ; and God is 
not less quick to forgive, nor less merciful 
and gracious than we are. Every man, no 
matter how bad his previous record, nor 
how prone to err his present tendencies, 
who really accepts in gratitude and admira- 
tion and devotion the Christlike character 
as it comes home to him in the person of 
some soul who worthily represents him, 
hath therein the assurance of the Father's 
favor, and the forgiveness of his sins. 

To doubt it is to make God less merciful 



Justification by Faith Reasonable 141 

than man; it is to deny God altogether. 
The doctrine of justification by faith is 
merely the theological way of stating the 
truth which all deep literature affirms, and 
all sound ethics establishes, that, as Brown- 
ing says, 

" Not on the vulgar mass 

Called 'work,' must sentence pass, 

Things done, that took the eye and had the price ; 

O'er which, from level stand, 

The low world laid its hand, 

Found straightway to its mind, could value in a trice : 

u But all, the world's coarse thumb 
And finger failed to plumb, 
So passed in making up the main account ; 
All instincts immature, 
All purposes unsure, 

That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man's 
amount : 

" Thoughts hardly to be packed 
Into a narrow act, 

Fancies that broke through language and escaped ; 
All I could never be, 
All, men ignored in me, 

This I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher 
shaped." 



/^2 God's Education of Man 

Justification is the condition in which 
man stands before God, and would stand 
in the eyes of all right-minded men, were 
they able to see him as he is, when he has 
gratefully and earnestly accepted in his 
heart the offer of Christian love and the 
ideal of Christian life, even though he has 
not been able to make his lips and hands 
adequately express the gratitude he feels 
and the purpose that he holds. 

IV 

Conversion. Time and Manner* The Pastor's 

Class 

This transition from selfish indulgence 
of natural appetite to grateful acceptance of 
the Christlike character and motive as the 
principle of choice, is conversion. Recent 
studies of this process, undertaken at Clark 
University, show that this change, so far 
from being an unnatural and miraculous 
experience, is a normal transition from a 
life centred in the little physical environ- 
ment into which the individual is born to 



Time and Manner of Conversion 143 

a life that is responsive to the larger envi- 
ronment of social obligations. This change 
occurs most frequently in girls at the age of 
from twelve to thirteen ; and with the next 
degree of frequency at sixteen. In boys it 
occurs with most frequency at fifteen ; and 
again with the next degree of frequency be- 
tween eighteen and nineteen. The change 
tends to correspond physically with the 
period of greatest bodily growth ; physio- 
logically with the advent of puberty ; psy- 
chologically with the ramification of nervous 
tissue and the ability to grasp general ideas ; 
socially with the emancipation from depen- 
dence upon parental authority and the en- 
trance into wider personal relations. 

A study of the motives leading to con- 
version shows that in early conversions 
self-regarding considerations and conviction 
of sin play the most important part, but 
steadily diminish in importance as the age 
increases. The moral ideal, on the other 
hand, is a small factor in the conversion of 
children at the age of from ten to thirteen, 



144 God' s Education of Man 

but rises rapidly in frequency and import- 
ance between the ages of thirteen and nine- 
teen. The persons who are converted under 
these self-regarding motives, if that may 
properly be called conversion, are specially 
liable to "back-sliding." Dr. Starbuck 
declares, as the result of his investigation, 
that " the relapses are generally among the 
younger persons." 

These and similar results of the psycho- 
logical investigator, dealing as he does with 
only a limited range of specially selected ex- 
perience, are doubtless less reliable than the 
mathematical exactness of his tables and 
the plotting of his lines and curves would 
indicate. Nevertheless they call attention 
to the normal character of the change ; and 
indicate in a general way the time at which 
it may be expected and encouraged. They 
show the fatal error of pressing upon chil- 
dren of tender years the fears of the future, 
the terrors of conscience, and the conviction 
of sin. They show the equally fatal error 
of allowing the precious years of ripeness 



The Pastor's Class 145 

for this great spiritual change to pass un- 
improved. They indicate as the proper 
attitude of the church something midway 
between the high emotional pressure of the 
revival meeting and the form of confirma- 
tion administered as a matter of course. It 
is an excellent plan for the pastor to keep 
a list of all the children and young people 
of the congregation ; and each Lenten sea- 
son personally to invite each one who has 
reached a certain point in the graded Sun- 
day school to join a pastor's class for the 
study of the fundamental principles of the 
Christian life. This class is preparatory to 
entrance into the communion and fellow- 
ship of the church : yet only those who feel 
attracted to the Christian life as thus pre- 
sented, and express a personal desire to 
live the Christian life, are candidates for 
graduation from the class and promotion 
into the full fellowship of the Christian 
church. This plan utilizes the principle of 
concentration and expectancy and gentle 
pressure, which were features of the old 



146 God* s Education of Man 

revival method; yet avoids the indiscrimi- 
nate urgency and emotional excitement 
which too often did more harm than the 
other features of the movement were able 
to do good. 

V 
Regeneration a Gradual Process. Its Univer- 
sality and Necessity 

Viewed from the point of its origin this 
change from the natural to the spiritual life 
is called regeneration. The fact that the 
new birth originates, not in the man himself, 
but in the Spirit appealing to him from with- 
out through the personal example and in- 
fluence of Christian friends, and begetting 
within him a life better than his own, like 
most of the good old-fashioned doctrines 
which the world had first misunderstood, 
then doubted, and finally denied, is receiv- 
ing striking confirmation from contemporary 
analysis and research. Tarde, Baldwin, and 
Royce are enunciating, in a little different 
terminology but in as sweeping and uncom- 
promising form as the author of the Fourth 



Regeneration a Gradual Process 147 

Gospel himself, the doctrine that man is an 
imitation, a reproduction of the social en- 
vironment to which he responds. If a man 
becomes good it is because he sees good- 
ness in some person, or in some institu- 
tion like family, or state, or church, which 
is composed of persons, and tries to repro- 
duce it in himself. According to these 
writers all the acts of childhood are either 
imitations of their superiors or else the prac- 
ticing, upon their inferiors, of what they 
have learned from their superiors. The doc- 
trine of regeneration is simply the appli- 
cation to religion of the psychological axiom 
that nothing can be in a man which has not 
first been suggested to him from without. 

Let any one ask himself whether he ever 
attained a height of character or a quality 
of spirit the suggestion and inspiration to 
which did not come to him from without, 
through the example of parent, the counsel 
of teacher, the stimulus of friend, or the 
portrayal of art ; and he will have brought 
home to him his absolute dependence for 



148 God' s Education of Man 

spiritual elevation and transformation upon 
that Spirit of whom our parents and teach- 
ers and friends, in so far as they are holy 
and pure and true, all poetry in so far as it 
is noble, all pictures in so far as they are 
beautiful, all history in so far as it is true 
to what is best in humanity, are the living 
witnesses and embodiments. 

Denial of the necessity of regeneration 
is virtual denial of the presence of the 
Spirit of God in the life of humanity. What, 
in speaking of the attributes of God, we call 
grace, is in fact God himself ; and God, 
as he is manifested in human lives and 
human institutions and human history, is 
what we mean by the Spirit of God. Hence, 
as the Spirit is the more personal expres- 
sion of that side of the Divine Nature, 
which, when we speak more abstractly, we 
call the attribute of grace ; so regeneration 
is a more intimate and personal expression 
for that response on the part of man, which, 
when viewed more formally and forensi- 
cally, we describe as justification by faith. 



Regeneration a Gradual Process 149 

Thus repentance and conversion, regen- 
eration and j ustification, are all slightly dif- 
ferent aspects of the response man makes 
when he comes to recognize that God, as 
Christ revealed him and as Christian hearts 
continue to reveal him, is a gracious and 
friendly Spirit seeking man's own good, 
and forgiving his iniquities whenever he 
repents. 

One cannot apprehend the nature of this 
spiritual change without perceiving that it 
must be very gradual and to a great degree 
subconscious. Even the apparent ex- 
ceptions prove this rule. For Paul and 
Augustine had been familiar with the ex- 
ample and teaching of Christians long be- 
fore they yielded ; and the intensity with 
which they kicked against the pricks shows 
that the pricking process had long been 
deeply at work within their consciences. 

No person can step at once from a life 
of natural appetite, restrained only by law 
and fear of penalty, to a life of grateful 
recognition and responsiveness to the good- 



J 5° God's Education of Man 

ness and grace of God incarnate in Christ, 
and reproduced in the spirit of Christlike 
human souls. The momentum of associa- 
tion and habit is too strong ; the hold on 
the new principles too vague and weak. 
If the change is to be permanent and 
fruitful, there must be systematic pro- 
vision for the renewing of the appeals of 
grace at stated times and places ; for the 
reinforcing of the influences of the spirit 
through habitual exercises and associations. 
There are three such spiritual agencies. 

VI 

The Scriptures the Interpreter of Christ 

First ; we have the life and letters of the 
Master and those who shared his spirit. 
It often happens that through a good bio- 
graphy and ample correspondence we may 
understand a man and a movement better 
than many of his intimate associates were 
able to. Many of us know Washington far 
better than the laborers who were employed 
on his estate : many of us can form a far 



The Scriptures the Interpreter of Christ 151 

truer picture of the real Lincoln than the 
customers who bought goods of him over 
the counter, or the men who employed him 
to split rails, or even the lawyers who met 
him on the circuit, and the legislators who 
sat with him in Congress. Even more is 
this the case with Jesus. We can under- 
stand him far better than could Nicodemus 
or Philip. We should be incapable of pre- 
sumption and errors into which Peter and 
the sons of Zebedee were perpetually fall- 
ing. There is no magic in the Bible ; and 
theories of interpretation have been put 
upon it which are calculated to deprive it 
of the virtue that it has. But when ration- 
ally and spiritually used, it has power to do 
the very thing we need. It enables us to 
reproduce to our own thought and feeling 
the personal Christ, and the spirit he in- 
fused into his followers. An intelligent 
and thoughtful student of the New Testa- 
ment ought to be able in any circumstance 
of life to know with substantial accuracy 
what Jesus would say and do were he 



152 God 1 s Education of Man 

placed in that situation. I do not, of 
course, refer to scientific and critical and 
historical questions, concerning which pre- 
sumably Jesus knew as little as we to-day 
know of the problems which will occupy 
the world in the year of our Lord 4000 ; 
but to problems of life and duty, and the 
spirit in which we should meet the needs 
and claims, the loves and hates of our fel- 
low-men. So many-sided was his teaching 
and his life, that out of the record we can 
reconstruct his personality more clearly 
and comprehensively than that of any other 
great character in history. We know that 
he was rooted and grounded in love to God 
and love to man ; and we know how he in- 
terpreted and applied the principle of love 
toward pretentious hypocrites on the one 
hand and condemned outcasts on the other; 
and how he dealt with typical cases all the 
way between these two extremes. Out of 
the Old Testament, on which he was nur- 
tured, and the New Testament, which he 
created and inspired, we can gather the ele- 



Prayer : Vital Communion 153 

ments which made up his personality ; and 
study by ourselves the lessons which he 
came to teach the world ; and continue the 
work his spirit began in us when first we 
turned from our selfishness and sin, and 
welcomed his forgiving grace as the princi- 
ple of a new and better life. 

VII 

Prayer not Reflex Action but Vital Communion. 
Its Answer Inevitable 

A second indispensable aid to faith is 
prayer. Prayer gathers into personal unity 
the scattered fragments of God's will re- 
vealed in Scripture, and in the lives of 
good men who share the Christian spirit. 
To this personal God, interpreted through 
Christ and the spirit, the prayerful man 
devoutly says "Not my will, but thine be 
done." Prayer is petition ; but it is petition 
tempered by glad surrender to a will higher 
and better than one's own. It is the pre- 
sentation of the human will for inspection 
and orders to the divine Commander. It 



/ 54 God's Education of Man 

is the systematic continuance of the work 
which conversion begins. It is the process 
by which we keep the car of life in constant 
connection with the spiritual trolley; the 
essential condition of keeping up the mo- 
mentum which the Spirit in regeneration 
imparts. 

The answer to prayer is as certain and 
inevitable as any other case of cause and 
effect. The will of God, the grace of 
Christ, the influence of the Spirit cannot be 
brought into contact with the submissive 
and receptive heart of man without pro- 
ducing therein their appropriate effects in 
changed desires, strengthened resolutions, 
truer words and better deeds. And the 
man cannot be changed in his thoughts 
and purposes, his words and deeds, without 
effecting corresponding changes in the 
world without. Nor is this change in the 
first instance mere reflex action, as it is 
sometimes erroneously called. A mere 
desire thrown out into the air, or acknow- 
ledged to one's self, would produce an effect 



Answer to Prayer Inevitable 1 55 

on the soul of the man who avowed the 
desire. And such a reaction of his own 
act upon himself might, though even then 
rather inappropriately, be called " reflex ac- 
tion." But that is not prayer. Prayer is 
the communion of two wills, both of which 
are more or less explicitly realized and 
present in consciousness. Hence the sub- 
sequent state of the soul that prays is not 
merely the reaction of one will upon itself 
as the result of its own exertions ; but the 
resultant of the union and communion of 
the two wills ; the amplification of the di- 
vine will through recognition of a new 
human factor in the total situation ; the 
transformation of the human will conse- 
quent upon its having been brought humbly 
and reverently into the presence of the 
divine Will. Such prayer when offered by 
a Christian is in the name of Christ. That 
is, the content of his representation of the 
will of God is made up chiefly of elements 
which he has come to know through appro- 
priation of the mind of Christ. For the 



156 God' s Education of Man 

ethical and spiritual purpose of God is 
known to us chiefly through the life of 
righteousness of which Christ is the his- 
toric incarnation, and Christian people are 
the living witnesses and reproductions. As 
Jesus said, " The Father and I are one." 
" No man cometh to the Father but by me." 
No psychology of prayer that omits the 
representation of the spirit and will of 
God from the mind of the petitioner has 
grasped the reality of prayer at all. The 
fact that a good deal of indolent desire and 
indefinite longing and vain repetition is 
labeled prayer, should not blind us to the 
fact that true prayer is the most intense 
and vital exercise of which man is capable ; 
and that in that exercise a representation 
of what God is and wills, as his nature and 
will have been made known to us in Christ 
and the Christian spirit, is quite as essen- 
tial a feature as our own desires and needs. 
This systematic habit of bringing the 
high ideal, the personal presence, the holy 
will of God into close contact with the 



Need of Christian Fellowship 157 

heart, and compelling sway over the will 

by surrendering the will, uplifting the heart, 

opening the mind to God, at regular and 

stated intervals, in private and in public, at 

every solicitation of temptation, in every 

moment of uncertainty, is the most potent 

weapon of faith. It has indeed often been 

sheathed in unintelligible ritual, dulled by 

unworthy use, and imitated in baser metal. 

But wherever it is the plain and direct 

communion of the mind and heart of man 

with the spirit and will of God, there its 

supreme potency is forever proved anew; 

there its inevitable effects are perpetually 

manifest. 

VIII 

The Need of Christian Fellowship. The 
Dawning Sense of Freedom 

The third great aid of faith is fellowship. 
The soldier who should shoulder his indi- 
vidual musket and march across the fields 
to meet the foe alone, would find his patri- 
otic ardor fast oozing out ; and even if he 
should actually attack the enemy, his indi- 



1^8 God's Education of Man 

vidual efforts would be of no avail. So 
Christian faith needs fellowship ; both for 
its own support in the individual, and for 
efficiency in the conflict with organized and 
aggressive wrong. One finds so many of 
the old evil habits cropping out that he 
doubts whether he has been really born 
again. Then the external sacrament of 
baptism is a welcome assurance against the 
conflicting witness of the rebellious ele- 
ments within. The reproduction of the 
Christlike example and spirit within him is 
so slow and partial that he doubts whether 
he belongs to Christ after all. Then the 
sacrament of the Lord's Supper brings 
direct from the instituting will of the Mas- 
ter the assurance that to all who in ear- 
nestness and sincerity will do a simple act 
expressive of the desire to receive him, to 
them, and so often as they do it, Christ 
gives himself anew, with pardon for their 
sins and fresh strength for the renewal of 
the struggle. 

So when the individual life seems to be 



Need of Christian Fellowship 1 59 

profitless and unfruitful, it is a confirmation 
of faith to join with the great congregation 
in worship and praise to God, beneficence 
and service to man ; and to feel that through 
our presence and support, our gifts and 
prayers, we have our part in the great work 
of Christ and his kingdom, at home and in 
foreign lands. To join with others who 
are engaged in the same great conflict ; to 
compare experience with them, and unite 
with them in aspiration and endeavor, helps 
to keep warm and lively the faith within us 
which otherwise would soon grow cold and 
dead, like the coal taken from the grate 
and dropped on the chill hearth alone. 

In these experiences of the grace of God 
and through these spiritual aids man ad- 
vances to a new stage of freedom. Under 
law man was constrained ; accepting con- 
formity to its requirements as only a lesser 
evil than suffering its penalties. Of two 
possible alternatives he chose the one he 
least disliked. He was not strong enough 
or wise enough always to choose even that. 



160 God's Education of Man 

Hence under the form of free choice, his 
action was substantially forced upon him, 
either by his appetites within, or social 
standards and authorities without. 

Under grace, on the contrary, man 
chooses what appeals to him as good, and 
the highest good. Indeed it is too good ; 
so high that he cannot at once attain unto 
it. Under law he tries to do what in 
his inmost heart he does n't really want to 
do. Hence, whether he succeeds or fails, 
he has only the form of freedom. Under 
grace, in glad response to the manifest 
goodness and kindness of God, man is try- 
ing to do what in his softened and repent- 
ant heart he feels and knows to be the su- 
preme good. Hence, even though he fails, 
as to some extent he must fail, he is at least 
striving to express his inmost self ; and 
therein has the dawning sense of what it is 
to be really free. 

Yet even the freedom that comes of 
grace through faith is incomplete. For 
though the spirit, when once touched to 



Dawning Sense of Freedom 16 1 

grateful responsiveness through grace, is 
willing, the flesh continues to be weak. 
Under law man said, "I want to gratify 
my appetites and passions regardless of the 
harm to others, and law won't let me." 
Under grace he says, "I want to respond 
worthily to the appeal of grace, but my 
appetites and habits won't let me." In 
Paul's language, "To will is present with 
me, but to do that which is good is not. 
For I delight in the law of God after the 
inward man : but I see a different law in 
my members, warring against the law of 
my mind, and bringing me into captivity 
under the law of sin which is in my mem- 
bers. O wretched man that I am ! Who 
shall deliver me out of the body of this 
death ? " 

For that complete deliverance from the 
power, as well as from the love of sin, we 
must look to a principle deeper even than 
grace, and a bond stronger even than faith. 
Conversion from sin, regeneration through 
the Spirit, justification by faith, responsive- 



1 62 God's Education of Man 

ness to grace, are different aspects of the 
process which marks the turning-point in 
the great race which starts with law : but 
the turning-point is not the goal. Whoever 
rests content in the mere repetition and 
revival of these elementary spiritual experi- 
ences, as some of our Methodist, Salvation 
Army, Christian Association and Christian 
Endeavor brethren are prone to do, will 
remain to the end a mere babe in Christ : 
if indeed he does not grow weary of the 
monotony of being born over and over again 
and give up the new life altogether. 



CHAPTER III 
CHARACTER THROUGH SERVICE 



An' I spoke to God of our Contract, an' He says to my 
prayer : 

" I never put on My ministers no more than they can 
bear. 

So back you go to the cattle-boats an' preach My Gos- 
pel there. 

"They must quit drinkin' an' swearin', they mustn't 

knife on a blow, 
They must quit gamblin' their wages, and you must 

preach it so ; 
For now those boats are more like Hell than anything 

else I know.'' 

I did n't want to do it, for I knew what I should get, 
An' I wanted to preach Religion, handsome an' out of 

the wet, 
But the Word of the Lord were lain on me, an' I done 

what I was set. 

An' I sign for four pound ten a month and save the 

money clear, 
An' I am in charge of the lower deck, an' I never lose a 

steer ; 
An' I believe in Almighty God an' preach His Gospel 

here. 

Kipling: Mulholland''s Contract 



CHAPTER III 



CHARACTER THROUGH SERVICE 




Character the completion. Service the expression 
of the work begun by Law and Grace 

"J1AW controls the outward act. 
Grace draws out the inmost feel- 
ings. Yet neither obedience to 
law nor faith in grace can make character 
complete. To make the inner and the outer 
man at one, according to the prayer of 
Socrates, to make our work the expression 
of our faith, is what the Bible means by 
love; what theologians mean by sanctifi- 
cation ; what philosophers mean by freedom ; 
what the plain man means by character. 
The associations of the word love have 
become too sentimental ; those of freedom 
too metaphysical ; those of sanctification too 
technical to express the third and highest 



1 66 God' s Education of Man 

stage of man's spiritual education. A holy 
heart and a forceful hand must go together 
to make the ideal Christian man. The legal- 
ist is hard. The pietist is weak. The man 
of highest Christian character is he in whom 
the grace of God inspires the love of man ; 
and love of man makes the keeping of the 
law spontaneous and free. When Henry- 
George called on Cardinal Manning, the 
conversation taking a religious turn, the 
Cardinal remarked, " I love men because 
Jesus loved them ; " to which Mr. George 
replied, "And I love Jesus because he loved 
men." It matters little which order one 
follows. It is absolutely essential that in 
some way heart and hand, the ideal and the 
actual, love to God and service to man 
shall be united Not until our brothers 
are the better and happier for our presence 
in the world, have we fulfilled the law, or 
given expression to our faith, or reached the 
goal of Christian character. 

At this point the question at once arises, 
" If this is what it all comes to ; if Christian 



Character and Service i6y 

character is the one thing essential ; and if 
practical service is the way in which Chris- 
tian character must find expression, what 
is the use of all this preliminary discipline 
of law ? What is the use of this elaborate 
experience of grace ? " 

One might as well ask, " Since it is the 
water of the river that turns the machinery 
of the mill, what is the use of a dam and 
a canal ? " The undisciplined and uncon- 
trolled appetites and passions of our nature 
no more tend of themselves to serve the 
interests of others, than the water flowing 
down the natural bed of the river tends to 
turn the machinery in the mill upon its 
banks. Law is the dam thrown across the 
stream of these natural desires, to prevent 
their going to waste in simple natural indul- 
gence. Faith is the canal which confines 
the accumulated force of desire and concen- 
trates it upon an obj ect other than self. Not 
until desire has been first resisted and then 
concentrated and directed aright, is it pre- 
pared to love and serve others most pro- 



J 68 God's Education of Man 

f oundly and effectively. More than that, the 
example and inspiration of Christ give us a 
conception of the possible length and breadth 
and height and depth of service to our fel- 
lows which infinitely transcends any ideal 
the individual is likely to set up for himself. 
And finally, it is not until we have felt within 
our own souls the experience of the love of 
another for us, in advance of our deserving 
it, and even in spite of our many ill-deserts, 
that we are able ourselves to overlook the 
failings and forgive the offenses of our fel- 
lows. Love is something which we cannot 
work up within ourselves at will. It must 
be first begotten in us by the love of others 
to ourselves, in the form of grace, before 
we can give it forth to others in the same 
generous and self-forgetful form. We can 
work out only what has been wrought into 
us. That is why experience of law and 
grace precede and prepare the way for the 
life of loving service wherein they are ful- 
filled. That is what St. John means by say- 
ing that " Love is of God ; and every one 



Character and Service 169 

that loveth is begotten of God, and knoweth 
God." 

Love is like an atmosphere. A man 
must be all in it, or all out of it. He can- 
not live half hate toward man, half love 
toward God. He cannot expect to receive 
forgiveness and grace from God except in 
so far as he manifests the same grace and 
forgiveness toward his fellows. 

Thus the man who comes to the love of 
his fellow-men through love of the Father 
finds, not that the love of the one is an in- 
ference or conclusion from the love of the 
other • but that the true love of God is the 
love of what he loves, or his fellow-men ; and 
at the same time that the true love of his 
fellow-men is so far forth a love of the God 
whose love includes them. Hence his love 
for his fellow-men does not depend on the 
accidents of individuality and time and cir- 
cumstance, as does the love of the natural 
man who has never learned to see his fel- 
low-men in the light of their common rela- 
tion to his Father and their Father, his 



/ yo God's Education of Man 

God and their God. His love acquires a 
constancy and impartiality, a power to bear 
all things, believe all things, hope all things, 
and endure all things in their behalf; be- 
cause it is steadied and reinforced by the 
universal love of the Father, in which all 
human love inheres. He is not provoked 
by men's resentment ; nor does he fail to 
love them still, in spite of their lack of 
appreciation. The love that is born of 
God, the love that cares for others as they 
are, and makes their ends its own, is as 
superior to that counterfeit love which is 
born of nature, and makes others means 
to one's own sensuous, mercenary, or am- 
bitious ends, as heaven is higher than the 
earth. In Emerson's phrase, the one is 
celestial, the other demoniacal. 

" Love's hearts are faithful, but not fond, 
Bound for the just, but not beyond ; 
Not glad, as the low-loving herd, 
Of self in others still preferred, 
But they have heartily designed 
The benefit of broad mankind 
And they serve men austerely, 
After their own genius, clearly, 



Character and Service iji 

Without a false humility ; 
For this is Love's nobility, — 
Not to scatter bread and gold, 
Goods and raiment bought and sold ; 
But to hold fast his simple sense, 
And speak the speech of innocence, 
And with hand and body and blood, 
To make his bosom-counsel good. 
He that feeds men serveth few ; 
He serves all who dares be true." 

As Jesus tells us repeatedly, the highest 
spiritual life is the unconscious service that 
scarce knows itself as service at all; the 
self-forgetful love that is so immersed in 
the stream of life that it scarcely appears 
above the surface as a distinct thing at all. 
It is of the utmost importance that we 
recognize the superiority of this uncon- 
scious, unpretentious service in our day. 
Under the dominance of the law, a legal 
Christianity sets up the ascetic type of 
piety as supreme. Then your model 
Christian is the person who does n't dance, 
does n't play cards, does n't go to the 
theatre; in extreme cases, doesn't even 



17 2 God's Education of Man 

hold property or marry. Our modern 
Protestant world is happily outgrowing all 
that. Under the dominance of faith, the 
model Christian becomes the person who 
attends the prayer-meeting and the sewing- 
circle, contributes to foreign missions and 
numerous charities, teaches in the Sunday 
school, lives in a settlement, and, in gen- 
eral, goes about doing good in conscious 
and conspicuous imitation of the example 
of the Master. This is much better ; but 
it is not by any means the best. To per- 
mit this type to regard itself as best, or to 
become tacitly accepted as the typical 
saintly attitude, is to stunt our spiritual 
development, and linger forever in the 
second of the three great stages of the 
spiritual life. All this is good, and in its 
place essential : but its place is a subordi- 
nate one ; the second, not the third ; the 
outer court of the temple, not the inmost 
shrine. In comparison with the mere in- 
dulgence of the sensualist, or the barren 
restrictions of the ascetic, it is great ; but 



Character and Service 173 

it is not the " greater things " which Jesus 
expected of his followers ; not " the great- 
est thing in the world." It is one of the 
besetting sins of clergymen to place the 
greatest value on these things; because 
they are the most conspicuous ; because 
they come closest to their special sphere of 
work. It is judging laymen by clerical 
standards. It is placing the son who says 
" I go, Sir," and went not, above the one 
who made a less satisfactory reply in the 
immediate presence of his father, but went 
out into the vineyard actually to do his will. 
It is a danger from which religious societies 
and associations made up exclusively of 
young people are never free. Whether 
the ultimate effect of these societies is bad 
or good depends on whether they regard 
the emotional expression of their faith in 
public gatherings as the main end of their 
endeavor; or as a means toward a life of 
more fruitful service in which the element 
of subjective emotional experience shall 
gradually merge itself in less conscious but 



/ 74 God's Education of Man 

more practical forms of concrete social ser- 
vice. 

II 

Christian Character consists in doing one's 
Specific Work well for the Glory of God and 
the Good of Man 

What then is this third and highest form 
of Christian character? It is the doing 
of one's specific work well for the glory of 
God and the good of one's fellow-men. On 
the outside it looks very much like a rever- 
sion to the first stage of merely keeping 
the law. But it is positive where that is 
negative ; and it is enriched, as that is not, 
by the enlargement of heart and motive 
which has come through personal experi- 
ence of the love of God and of good men 
toward us prompting and inspiring us to 
love God and our fellows in return. On the 
inside it appears as identical in form with 
faith ; but it differs from that in having the 
form of devotion filled out with concrete 
and practical contents instead of resting in 
abstract and ideal form. 



Character : Doing One's Work Well iy$ 

Character is at once more inward than con- 
formity to enacted law, more outward than 
aspiration toward a cherished ideal. It is 
the taking up of the outward law and filling 
it with the fervor and enthusiasm of a 
spontaneous inner life. It is the carrying 
out of the inner life into those forms of 
practical expression which the law enjoins. 
Yet it is more than this. For law is ab- 
stract and general. It does not fit particu- 
lar cases, nor point out his precise duty to 
the particular individual. Christian charac- 
ter, however, has the insight to discover 
and the tact to promote the good of others 
and of all in the most intimate of personal 
relations and in the most delicate of prac- 
tical situations. Hence any account of 
the structure and working of Christian 
character must of necessity be very inade- 
quate and incomplete. Character must be 
incarnate in a person and wrought into a 
life, as it has been once for all in Christ, 
and is continually repeated in the lives of all 
his true followers. Only the dead anatomy 



ij6 God' s Education of Man 

and dissected organs of this Christian char- 
acter and life can be written out in a book. 
Still, even anatomy and physiology are 
useful in their way ; and there is one great 
underlying principle of the Christian char- 
acter and life which requires especial em- 
phasis. 

Each person has first of all some specific 
place to fill ; some specific function to per- 
form. No one else can fill that place if he 
deserts it ; no one else can do his work for 
him if he shirks it, or does it ill. To fill 
this specific place well should be the chief 
concern of every Christian. No promiscu- 
ous activity in other lines, whether ecclesi- 
astical, social, literary, philanthropic, scien- 
tific, or artistic, can atone for neglect of 
the specific thing God has committed to 
our care, and for which our fellow-men have 
a right to depend upon us. 

To the wife and mother, this specific 
sphere is obviously home ; and the domestic 
rather than the social and public aspects of 
the home. If husband and father are not 



Character : Doing One's Work Well 177 

made healthful and happy there, no con- 
spicuous performances at club or reception 
can atone for this fundamental unfaithful- 
ness. If the boys and girls are not reared 
from day to day and year to year in close 
and loving contact with a wisdom and 
gentleness and tenderness which tends to 
make virtue instinctive and vice repellent, 
then no activities in church and Sunday 
school, no official position on Boards and 
Committees can wash away the stain of 
a fundamental responsibility wantonly be- 
trayed. 

The husband and father, in turn, has the 
honest support of the family as his prime 
concern. Idleness in others is a fault ; in 
him it is a crime. Speculative investments 
by others are foolish ; when indulged in by 
him they are wicked. Life insurance for 
others is a luxury; for him it is a duty. 
Economy, for others a counsel of perfection, 
is for him an unescapable decree. No free- 
handed treating at the bar or elaborate 
hospitalities of the club, no lavish expendi- 



iy8 God's Education of Man 

ture either in charities or sports can render 
spiritually respectable the husband and 
father who does not make the proper pro- 
vision for his family's support his prime 
concern. Home is not the whole of life, 
and persons may be faithful and loyal here 
and at the same time very false and treach- 
erous elsewhere. The part does not include 
the whole ; but the whole does include the 
parts, and especially demands integrity in 
the most fundamental parts. No person's 
love to God or man is worth the breath 
in which it is professed unless it includes 
first and foremost a comfortable and happy 
home for all members of his family. 

To rear a large and vigorous family in 
health and happiness, though not the whole 
duty of man and woman, is yet the foremost 
duty; and nothing short of the most im- 
perative claims of public service on the one 
hand, or positive physical or economic dis- 
ability on the other, can excuse failure at 
this point. The sacredness of sex as the 
fountain of the humanity of the future, and 



Character : Doing One's Work Well 179 

responsibility for the physical, mental, and 
moral character of posterity, is the gospel 
which more than all others needs to be 
vigorously preached to Protestant Ameri- 
can families. As compared with bringing 
human souls into the world and training 
them for useful service and enjoyable life, 
all the pressing claims of business, all the 
fastidious aims of art, all the restless quest 
for culture, all the persistent urgency of 
society, all the gilded glamour of the clubs 
for men, and all the ponderous programmes 
of the clubs for women, shrivel into insig- 
nificance. 

Work as a means to livelihood of self and 
family, however, though the prime requi- 
site of the spiritual life, is only its begin- 
ning. This income-producing aspect of it 
is only the subjective side of work. All 
work, according as it is done well or 
ill, is a benefit or injury to all whom it 
affects. The carpenter, the mason, the 
plumber, the painter, the machinist, in so 
far as the work he does is honest and thor- 



180 God's Education of Man 

ough and durable, is a public benefactor; 
in so far as his work is slipshod and 
superficial and slovenly, he is a thief and 
robber. In the one case he is a genuine 
and vital member of that good order of so- 
ciety which is the will of God. In the other 
case he is a parasite drawing his living 
from that social order by eating the heart 
out of it. 

The farmer and the manufacturer are in 
God's kingdom or out of it chiefly according 
as the goods they produce are sound and 
genuine, or defective and adulterated. The 
merchant's standing with God depends 
chiefly on whether he has a just and con- 
siderate regard for the rights of his cred- 
itors and the reasonable claims of his 
patrons ; or whether he is simply bent on 
getting as much out of them as possible, 
and giving as little as possible in return. 
The director and manager of large financial 
interests is a sharer in God's spiritual life 
or not, according as his dealings repre- 
sent real values and utilities and services, 



Character : Doing One's Work Well 181 

or as they represent privileges corruptly 
procured through bribes ; competitors killed 
off through unjust discrimination; capital 
which is either fictitious or secured under 
false pretenses ; schemes which tempo- 
rarily benefit their promoters at the ulti- 
mate expense of the public. 

Whether a professional man is a Chris- 
tian or not depends mainly on whether he 
brings to client, patient, or parishioner 
the latest and best resources his profession 
affords, or puts them off with what was 
good enough for his fathers ; letting men 
lose their lives, their property, or their 
rational religious faith because he is too 
indolent to keep abreast of the times. The 
teacher and writer is saint or sinner pri- 
marily according as the presentation of 
truth in attractive and winsome form to 
pupil or reader is the object of unwearying 
training and research, correction and self- 
criticism ; or as he is content to palm off 
traditional views in conventional form with 
little concern as to truth of substance, or 



1 82 God's Education of Man 

grace of style and manner. The person of 
wealth and leisure is ripening for heaven 
or hell just in proportion as that leisure 
and wealth are accepted as an opportunity 
to engage in vital and urgent forms of 
social and public service which cannot 
be effectively and gracefully performed by 
those whose main energies must be en- 
grossed in the support of themselves and 
their families ; or the same leisure and 
wealth are made the excuse for indolent 
indulgence in luxury, insolent contempt for 
labor, arrogant indifference to human wrong 
and suffering, and effeminate irresponsi- 
bility for social progress and reform. 

As a citizen, one's spiritual life is meas- 
ured by the degree to which he devotes 
thought, time, strength, money, influence, 
to the study of public policy, the nomina- 
tion and election of trustworthy and effi- 
cient officers, to service on committees and 
in offices which affect the public weal, to 
the advocacy of measures which make for 
public prosperity. His lack of spiritual 



Character : Doing One's Work Well 183 

life in turn is accurately measured by the 
extent to which he is willing to shirk these 
responsibilities himself, and turn them over 
to men who will betray them ; by his ac- 
quiescence in policies he believes to be 
wrong, for fear of personal unpopularity 
or impoverishment if he dares to oppose 
them ; by his idle confidence that if he 
neglects his individual duty in these mat- 
ters, other people will do theirs, and some- 
how or other things will come out all right 
in the end. 

In social life one is admitted to or ex- 
cluded from the kingdom of heaven accord- 
ing as the happiness of genuinely congenial 
persons is made his aim, and his entertain- 
ments are provided, and his invitations 
accepted, with that end consistently in view ; 
or personal ostentation and advancement 
are his objects in the elaborately calculated 
relations of host and guest. 

Even in what is often called the religious 
life, but what is strictly speaking the eccle- 
siastical life; in attendance upon public 



184 God's Education of Man 

worship, and the support of church activi- 
ties, the real Christian is marked off from 
the pious hypocrite according as these ser- 
vices and activities are regarded as instru- 
mental to that deeper service of God which 
consists of a life of practical righteousness 
and loving service to one's fellows ; or as 
they are viewed as devices for currying 
favor with God, and making a comfortable 
provision for the individual's own happiness 
in the hereafter. 

Ill 

The Se?ise of Proportion a?id the Art of Subor- 
dination Essential to the Highest Character 
and the Best Service 

All this is sufficiently clear and simple ; 
so that a wayfaring man though a fool 
need not err therein. The difficulty comes 
in preserving a right proportion between 
these several claims. For each normal in- 
dividual is identified with his fellows on all 
these sides at the same time. He is mem- 
ber of a family; earner of a livelihood; 



Sense of Proportion Essential 185 

producer of commodities or renderer of 
services ; man of leisure and some degree 
of wealth ; citizen, churchman, and member 
of a social circle. 

While these spheres do not necessarily 
conflict they do compete. Any one of 
them might absorb almost the whole of 
one's energy and resources. Such exclusive 
absorption in any one line of activity is 
justifiable only in the most extreme cases. 
For in such exclusive devotion, the particu- 
lar relation is apt to become an ultimate 
end in itself, rather than an element in a 
life of universal service, of which this is but 
one particular expression. The wife and 
mother who is that and nothing more tends 
to become narrow and selfish even in that. 
The business or professional man who is 
that and nothing more becomes hard and 
inhuman, even in the doing of that which 
in itself is an inestimable service to human- 
ity. Balance, health, sanity, spirituality 
require the distribution of devotion through 
all these different channels. On the other 



1 86 God's Education of Man 

hand an equal distribution would be fatal ; 
for in that case one would be fairly respect- 
able in many lines, but forceful, efficient, 
and highly serviceable in none. Each per- 
son must pick out some one central relation 
which shall absorb most of his time and 
energy ; and group the others around it in 
due subordination. The principle of selec- 
tion and subordination is the service of 
God in and through the service of our fel- 
lows. Hence the order of subordination will 
not be precisely the same for any two per- 
sons. It can be indicated only for types of 
persons ; and then only in a very general 
way. 

For wife and mother, as has been already 
said, home is central ; social duties are pre- 
sumably second ; philanthropic and church 
activities third ; economic and political con- 
siderations last. If, however, she have artis- 
tic gifts, and an impulse for expression, then 
these may well come second ; and society 
and church and philanthropy may be post- 
poned. 



Sense of Proportion Essential 187 

If, however, she have a gift for organiza- 
tion and the management of people, philan- 
thropic and religious work may well come 
second, and society and art may be thrust 
into the background, with business and 
politics. If she has a shiftless and improvi- 
dent husband and is shrewd and thrifty 
herself, business must claim the second 
place; and even if it creeps up into the 
first, while we may pity, we can scarcely 
blame. 

Husband and father, again, as has already 
been said, cannot allow any extraneous in- 
terest to excuse him from making the sup- 
port of the family his prime concern. Yet 
here there are degrees. To permit a family 
to surfer, or to drive the wife and young 
children out into the industrial world to 
earn their daily bread, is always an unpar- 
donable sin in an able-bodied man. This 
must stand first. Yet when the point of 
comfortable subsistence with reasonable as- 
surance for the future is secured, although 
for most men the provision for the family 



/ 88 God's Education of Man 

will continue to be the dominant considera- 
tion, it need not and ought not to be so in 
all cases. The scholar then may place 
scholarship first, and thrust into the back- 
ground the various ways of making money 
which represent no substantial scholarly 
achievement. He may neglect society to 
a degree which in less gifted men would 
imply a lack of human interest. The states- 
man, likewise, may neglect his private affairs 
in the service of the public to a degree 
which in men having no talent for public 
affairs would be a grievous fault. 

The man of leisure may give to social 
reforms a degree of attention which would 
be out of proportion in the man who has a 
business to manage, or a statesman with 
responsibilities of grave import upon him. 
The man or woman of sensitive spiritual 
feeling and insight may rightly give a degree 
of devotion to the church, to the cultivation 
of the subjective Christian graces and the 
development of the inner life of faith, which 
can hardly be expected of the man who is 



Sense of Proportion Essential i8g 

administering large practical and public 
affairs of so intricate and delicate a nature 
that any considerable withdrawal of over- 
sight and control would result in fatal ineffi- 
ciency and widespread disaster. A relative 
subordination of home and society, church 
and philanthropy, is not only permissible 
but obligatory for this man ; provided what 
holds him to his task be not the mere ex- 
citement of the contest and selfish absorp- 
tion in the game, but a serious and reverent 
acceptance of the fulfillment of these respon- 
sibilities as his specific contribution to that 
welfare of his fellows which he knows to 
be the will of God. Whatever order of sub- 
ordination the principle of largest service 
will justify for any individual, — that order, 
though it be wrong for every other man, is 
right and good for him. 



/ go God's Education of Man 

IV 

The Church and its Services a Means, not an 
End. The Bane of Clericalism and Senti- 

me?italism 

In thus placing the church on a level 
with other social agencies, and even recog- 
nizing its rightful subordination to home in 
all cases, and to business, society, and politics 
in special cases, one is not reducing God to 
a level with finite objects, nor admitting 
that true religion can be secondary to any 
other interest. Because God is larger than 
any particular institution he can be served 
through whatever subordination of one in- 
stitution or interest to others best serves 
that good of all which is his will. Because 
religion is devotion to that will, it is not 
confined to any one channel for its expres- 
sion. 

As a matter of fact, common sense does 
recognize and approve such a relative sub- 
ordination of ecclesiastical to secular inter- 
ests, as often consistent with the truest 



The Church a Means igi 

spirituality. The church, however, is often 
very reluctant to make this concession. 
Especially in Catholic and extreme evangel- 
ical circles the clergy are apt to set up the 
ecclesiastical life as practically synonymous 
with the religious life, and to identify 
devotion to the church with devotion to 
God. Then all subordination of ecclesias- 
tical to secular interests is looked upon as 
a weakness of the flesh, a compromise with 
the world, a concession to the Devil. The 
result is in every way disastrous. It sets 
up a religious instrumentality as an end in 
itself. It narrows and dwarfs the concep- 
tion of the religious life. It blinds the 
minds of men to the deeper spirituality 
which is found in the sanctification of the 
secular by the spirit of service. It turns 
over the great practical realities of life to 
the dominion of Satan. It permits a few 
feeble folk who have a gift for subjective, 
sentimental, introspective piety, to usurp 
the name of religion, and to pass as the 
saints of God, the elect of heaven ; while 



ig2 God 's Education of Man 

the great mass of the forceful men who are 
fighting the battles of real righteousness, 
and doing the works of practical beneficence, 
are relegated to a secondary and inferior 
spiritual rank. In Catholic countries this 
ecclesiasticism drives the men of practical 
power out of the church altogether ; leaving 
women, children, and priests in exclusive 
possession. In Protestant communities it 
retains these stronger elements in nominal 
connection with the congregation, but too 
often practically excludes them from the 
more intimate fellowship of the church it- 
self. The result is an enfeebled church, 
dominated by clerical ideals and sentimen- 
tal standards, on the one side ; and an un- 
regenerated world, given over to men of 
whom the highest spirituality is not ex- 
pected, on the other. 

What we need is the increasing recog- 
nition that the domestic, economic, com- 
mercial, social, political, and ecclesiastical 
spheres are all partial and coordinate 
phases of the life of service to the one 



Clericalism a Bane ig$ 

God who is immanent in them all, and is 
acceptably served through whatever corre- 
lation and subordination of these spheres 
enables the individual to render most effec- 
tive service to God and his fellow-men. 

Such a frank and honest denial of the 
absolute supremacy of the church is the 
surest way to recover for it its relative and 
rightful importance. The church is not the 
righteous life itself; but it is the training 
school for the life of righteousness. As 
such it is practically indispensable. -The 
educational analogy here is perfect. One 
may become an educated man without going 
to school or college ; for learning is not con- 
fined exclusively to academic walls. Home 
study, the stress of public life, the respon- 
sibilities of business, the pursuit of art and 
letters, may give a man an education en- 
tirely apart from the schools. Yet the peo- 
ple who get a thorough education in these 
extra-academic ways are few. The educa- 
tion thus gained is apt to be one-sided, out 
of relation to current modes of thought, 



194 God's Education of Man 

and hence in a measure socially inapplica- 
ble and ineffective. In the same way, 
through home training and experience of 
life one may absorb the Christian spirit 
of loving service entirely apart from the 
direct services and institutions and rites 
of the church. Yet here, as in educa- 
tion, the result is too often eccentric, 
individualistic, incommunicable, and unor- 
ganizable. Just as the great mass of men 
must come to the intellectual life through 
the educational channels of the school ; so 
the great majority of men must come to the 
spiritual life through the ministrations of 
the church. The church is to the life of 
the Spirit what the school system is to the 
training of the mind, — the regular agency 
which society has established, and men have 
come to accept as the ordinary means of 
spiritual education. 

The recognition of this educational func- 
tion of the church, as the training-school 
for the spiritual life, gives it a prestige and 
permanent importance which is almost as 



Clericalism a Bane 195 

exalted as the claim it has sometimes made 
for itself of being the spiritual life itself. 
And it has the immense advantage, that 
whereas the claim to be the spiritual life is 
false, and its results are pernicious, this 
claim to be the training-school for that life 
is true and practically justified. For, just 
as every man who loves learning, though he 
may criticise their educational methods, yet 
cannot fail to love and cherish and revere 
the schools and colleges of his country ; so 
the man who lives the spiritual life of loving 
service in home and business, politics and 
society, art and letters, cannot fail to rever- 
ence and love the church when once he 
recognizes it as the great training-school for 
just such service of God and man as that in 
which he is engaged. So long as the church 
exalts herself by arrogant pretensions to be 
the bearer of a spiritual life distinct from 
the life of practical social service, it will be 
deserted by the strong, brainy, forceful men 
of affairs, and left to languish in effeminate 
sentimentalism and die of clerical conceit. 



ig6 God's Education of Man 

The moment it humbles itself to accept its 
specific mission of training men for a ser- 
vice as much harder, and broader, and 
stronger, and higher than her own as the 
heavens are higher than the earth, as living 
is harder than preaching, as humanity is 
broader than priestcraft ; then it will be 
exalted, if not to the exclusive preeminence 
it sought at first, yet to an indispensable 
membership in the social order which shall 
never be taken from it. As long as the 
church tries to save the life of ecclesiasti- 
cism, and clericalism, and traditionalism, 
and exclusiveness, it will die the death that 
is in store for everything that is pretentious, 
and unreal, and formal, and empty, and un- 
serviceable. As soon as it loses this life of 
pious self-sufficiency and earnestly devotes 
itself to making holier and better all other 
departments of human life, it will find the 
life of power and honor that always awaits 
the man or the institution that is intent on 
self-forgetful usefulness and service. 



The Educational Analogy 797 

V 

The Educational Analogy. The Minister's 
Threefold Task 

This third stage of the spiritual life cor- 
responds to the university stage of educa- 
tion. Law deals with men as the school 
deals with children ; compelling them to do 
what is good for them though they do not 
like it at the time. Grace appeals to men 
as the college appeals to youth; winning 
them to the spiritual life by the inherent 
interest and attraction of the Ideal person- 
ally presented as the object of their affec- 
tion. Character treats men as the univer- 
sity treats its graduate students ; absolving 
them from definite rules and specified re- 
sponsibilities, and leaving them free to do for 
themselves something which is not exactly 
like anything that was ever done before. 
As the university is not content that its 
graduate student should simply learn and 
repeat what the university has to teach, but 
insists that he shall bring to it some contri- 



/ 98 God's Education of Man 

bution of his own ; so God admits us to the 
highest character, not in reward for keeping 
the moral law, or in recognition of our punc- 
tiliousness in the performance of church 
duties and services, but only on condition 
that we shall go out into the actual world 
and make it a healthier, richer, fairer, purer, 
j uster, happier world in consequence of 
the original contribution that we make to 
its domestic or social, its industrial or civic, 
its ecclesiastical or artistic life. Note, please, 
that the churchman is not excluded from 
the eligible list ; provided he make his ec- 
clesiastical contribution in the same meek 
and modest way that the artist offers his 
art, the business man his merchandise, the 
mother her family, the society woman her 
reception ; not as a thing apart from life or 
of self-sufficient excellence ; but as the spe- 
cific way in which he is best able to give his 
best to his fellows and his God. 

Such are the three stages of education 
through which man passes on his way from 
a life impelled by nature to the life that is 



The Minister's Threefold Task igg 

led by the Spirit. Every Christian congre- 
gation contains persons who are in each of 
these three stages. The Christian preacher 
who will fulfill his whole duty needs to pro- 
vide the warning and rebuke, the comfort 
and assurance, the inspiration and enthu- 
siasm which each stage of development 
requires. 

Unless he drives the selfish, sensual sin- 
ner to the corner of his pew in shame and 
contrition for his meanness and cruelty, his 
ministry will be a weak, sentimental affair ; 
the mere singing of a pleasing song, which 
has no effect to check and repress the awful 
ravages which greed and lust and pride and 
hate are making in the hearts and homes 
of every city and town and village and ham- 
let in our land. In his dealing with these 
hard problems he is as complete a failure as 
would be the teacher in the public school 
who should give to primary-school scholars 
the laxity of discipline and the freedom 
of method which is appropriate only to a 
university. Lawlessness and license, vice 



200 God's Education of Man 

and crime, are sure to flourish under the 
ministry of one who suffers one jot or tittle 
of the law to pass unheeded, or through 
neglect of teaching permits one of the least 
of its commandments to be broken. 

Unless he has an eager readiness to wel- 
come the first signs of introspection in the 
growing boy and girl ; unless by appropri- 
ate hints and suggestions he is skillful to 
deepen and intensify the self-questioning 
mood until it reaches the crisis of convic- 
tion of sin and ill-desert ; and then knows 
how gently to lead the soul distrustful of 
itself out into the green pastures of a perfect 
trust in God, and by the still waters of a 
complete confidence in Christ ; unless he is 
patient with the aberrations of morbidness 
and tolerant of the extravagances of enthusi- 
asm ; unless he has the imagination and 
sympathy to live over again the doubts and 
conflicts, the alternating hopes and fears, 
the swiftly shifting phases of exaltation and 
depression which marked his own entrance 
into the higher atmosphere of faith ; his 



The Minister's Threefold Task 201 

ministry will be cold, formal, hard, unfruit- 
ful. His error will be akin to that of 
college professors who either treat their 
students like schoolboys and are in a 
perpetual quarrel with them, or else treat 
them like mature men and fire all their 
instruction over their heads. The college 
professor must recognize that his students 
are neither boys nor men, but on the way 
from the one condition to the other. He 
must overlook many an animal outburst 
which the mere schoolmaster would sternly 
repress. He must put up with much cru- 
dity of thought and expression which the 
university professor would scorn to recog- 
nize. He must be able to live in an atmos- 
phere of perpetual turbulence and enthu- 
siasm, crudeness and waywardness ; he 
must appreciate and enjoy it ; and under- 
neath all its excesses and perturbations 
never lose sight of the genuine worth and 
power that is latent in it all. Precisely so 
the minister must live over again each year 
with a certain proportion of his congrega- 



202 God's Education of Man 

tion these first struggles after a firm foot- 
ing in the spiritual world ; welcome for 
the hundredth time the fresh discovery by 
some newly evolving soul of what to himself 
has been a commonplace of spiritual expe- 
rience for years ; never mind if faith does 
take on at first exaggerated, irrational, im- 
practicable forms, set itself impossible and 
useless tasks of asceticism, and run riot 
in all the extravagances of " other-world- 
liness." The colt that gives no trouble in 
the breaking makes but a sorry beast to 
drive in after years. The minister who 
lacks this power of sympathetic apprecia- 
ation of the struggles of early faith may lay 
down the law so that sinners will tremble 
on the one hand, or he may nurture the 
serene, sweet piety of mature and ripened 
saints on the other hand ; but he will not 
build up his church: the deaths and re- 
movals will exceed the accessions " on 
confession of faith ; " and the church will 
steadily decline upon his hands. 

Finally, unless the minister respects as 



The Minister's Threefold Task 203 

the genuine and essential substance of the 
spiritual life the quiet, steady life of useful- 
ness and service of plain, practical, common- 
sense people, who have had their emotional 
upheavals and intellectual struggles once 
for all, and have settled down to doing all 
the good they can in the station in which 
they are placed ; unless he can appreciate 
this at its true worth and give such souls 
his hearty encouragement and unqualified 
approval ; then he will have no power per- 
manently to " edify " the stronger and bet- 
ter element of his congregation; in spite 
of statistics in his favor and visible re- 
sults to show he will not be wanted long 
in any pastorate. His error is akin to that 
of a university professor who should insist 
on punctuality of attendance at required 
exercises and ability to recite volubly the 
elementary lessons in his subject ; and place 
little or no stress on freedom, original inves- 
tigation, independent results. He would 
be applying school and college methods to 
university students ; and as a result uni- 



204 God's Education of Man 

versity students would seek the direction 
of their work elsewhere. The ministers 
are very numerous who commit precisely 
this blunder. They insist on estimating 
the spiritual worth of their people by the 
number of meetings they attend, and the 
extent to which they take part ; forgetting 
that this is but one of many lines in which 
the mature spiritual life may find appropri- 
ate expression ; and that while it is to be 
welcomed from those for whom it is a 
natural and proportional expression of their 
love to God and man, it is not the only 
nor the chief sign by which the spiritual 
power of a church or an individual attests 
itself. 

The task of the minister is thus one of 
peculiar difficulty. In secular education, 
thanks to the graded system and the dif- 
ferentiation of institutions, the teacher has, 
as a rule, only one grade to deal with. The 
schoolmaster has what corresponds to law ; 
the college professor what corresponds to 
grace ; the university faculty what corre- 



The Minister's Threefold Task 205 

sponds to character. The minister, on the 
contrary, has all these three grades to deal 
with all the time. No minister can be 
equally adept in all three types of spiritual 
education. One man will be strong in 
laying down the law; another in present- 
ing the appeals of grace; and another in 
pointing out the practical applications of 
the principle of service. His strength at 
the point of greatest facility will be com- 
pensated for by comparative weakness in 
the other aspects of his work. The church 
which has a pastor who is strong in any 
one of these three lines should be thankful 
for that, and patient with defects in the 
others. And when a change is made, the 
church should aim to find a man who will 
be strong in the department of spiritual 
education which the outgoing pastor has 
most neglected. For spiritual education 
has these three well-marked stages ; and the 
permanent well-being of a community re- 
quires that all these stages shall be repre- 
sented in its ministry. The fact that faith 



206 God's Education of Man 

is better than mere obedience to an exter- 
nal law, does not warrant us in abrogating 
the law or neglecting to thunder its warn- 
ings and penalties in the dull ears to which 
the still small voice of grace is as yet inau- 
dible. Likewise the fact that character is 
greater than faith, and the helping of our 
fellow-men is more acceptable to God than 
ceremonial observances addressed directly 
to himself alone, should not blind us to the 
indispensable value of these ceremonial 
observances, or make us indifferent to the 
subjective exercises of souls struggling 
through the new birth into the unfamiliar 
atmosphere of faith. Each man and each 
church needs to carry along, though in 
different order and degree of subordination, 
according to circumstances and stage of 
development, all three types of spiritual 
discipline at once, and retain them to the 
very end. Otherwise faith will degenerate 
into antinomianism, and there will be " sin 
that grace may abound ; " love will vaunt 
itself in faithless presumption ; distracting 



TJie Minister's Threefold Task 207 

and dissipating multiplicity of labors will 
rob the soul that forgets to worship of the 
unity and peace and strength which are 
found in God alone. 

Discrimination is not separation. No 
greater calamity can befall man or church 
than to attempt to divide in practice what 
has here been discriminated. All reforms 
in the church have been attempts to restore 
one of these elements to its rightful promi- 
nence. Puritanism was the restoration of 
law, when faith and love had lapsed into 
laxity and license. Methodism was the 
restoration of grace, when law had lost 
its grip, and love was dragging her anchor. 
Unitarianism was the emphasis on charac- 
ter, when law had hardened into a form, and 
faith had shrunk to a formula. The Refor- 
mation was a recovery of faith from under- 
neath an overgrowth of loveless law and 
lawless love. Christianity itself was the 
introduction of faith and love into a sys- 
tem which had contracted into law alone. 

Our thought of God's dealing with man 



2o8 God's Education of Man 

must follow some familiar analogy. The 
analogy of legal procedure in a court of 
justice is worn out. It separates law and 
grace, setting them over against each 
other, much as the state gives the power of 
sentence to the judge, and the power of 
pardon to the governor. It leaves no room 
at all for love, which is greater than both. 
The educational analogy is not perfect. 
No analogy can be. But it does help us 
to see that these three attitudes, law, 
grace, and character, are not inconsistent 
or mutually exclusive, but successive stages 
of God's discipline of man ; just as school, 
college, and university are consistent and 
complementary features of a single educa- 
tional system. In our modern life, edu- 
cation is much more familiar to us than 
judicial procedure; the schools are more 
intimate factors in our lives than are the 
courts of law. Hence it may be a help 
toward a truer apprehension of God's atti- 
tude toward us to think of him, not as the 
stern Judge, tempering his justice with- 



The Minister's Threefold Task 209 

mercy, but rather as the patient and faith- 
ful, firm and friendly Teacher, who first 
constrains our wills to learn unwelcome 
lessons of obedience to law ; then wins our 
hearts to voluntary allegiance by the man- 
ifestations of his grace ; and finally leaves 
us to work out largely for ourselves, in 
original and independent ways, that char- 
acter which comes through loving service 
and which is perfect freedom. 



CONCLUSION 
TWO TYPES OF IDEALISTS 



" The common problem, yours, mine, every one's, 
Is — not to fancy what were fair in life 
Provided it could be, — but, finding first 
What may be, then find how to make it fair 
Up to our means : a very different thing ! " 
Robert Browning; Bishop Blougrani*s Apology. 




CONCLUSION 

TWO TYPES OF IDEALISTS 

I 

Plato and Aristotle 

pHE reader of the foregoing pages 
£• must have noticed that while the 
phrases of traditional orthodox 
theology have been largely used, yet they 
have often been employed in a different 
sense from that with which they are asso- 
ciated in many minds. Religious truth has 
been presented from what to many persons 
will seem a novel point of view. To state 
in technical terms the precise difference 
between the traditional point of view and 
that which has been presented here, would 
lead us into metaphysical inquiries which are 
foreign to the popular purpose of this little 
book. To defend the positions taken here 
against the positions which they are calcu- 



214 God's Education of Man 

lated to supplant would raise the whole 
fundamental question as to whether the 
transcendence or the immanence of God is 
the profounder principle on which to base 
the practical religious life of man. 

What cannot be done in the form of 
Bcgriff, may often be hinted in a series of 
Vorstellungen. By seeing what the differ- 
ence between these two points of view means 
for Greek and German philosophy, for litera- 
ture and art, for politics and missions, one 
may come by inference to understand that 
the same fundamental tendency in theology, 
though beset with peculiar dangers, is not 
fatal to the religious life ; and to accept as 
logically inevitable here what has come to 
pass in other spheres of human interest and 
activity. The fundamental issue is between 
abstract and concrete idealism. 

Plato and Aristotle are the great repre- 
sentatives of these two tendencies among 
the Greeks. Raphael in his School of 
Athens has happily indicated the difference 
between these two men in the attitudes in 



Plato and Aristotle 215 

which he places them. Plato stands with 
upturned finger pointing to the one perfect 
Good beyond the clouds ; Aristotle with 
down-turned hand outstretched toward the 
complex details of earth. Plato sees what 
might be, and condemns all that is because 
it falls short of this. Aristotle sees what 
is, and strives to bring the best that may- 
be out of that. 

Plato draws a picture of the ideal republic, 
and tells us, " Until philosophers are kings, 
or the kings and princes of this world have 
the spirit and power of philosophy, and 
political greatness and wisdom meet in one, 
and those commoner natures who follow 
either to the exclusion of the other are 
compelled to stand aside, cities will never 
cease from ill, — no, nor the human race, as 
I believe, — and then only will this our state 
have a possibility of life and see the light 
of day." Aristotle tells us how existing 
states are actually governed ; and by criti- 
cism of their defects, points, not indeed to 
the finished ideal, but to the direction the 



2i 6 God' s Education of Man 

actual state must take in order to approach 

Plato will permit to his picked citizen, 






who is to guide and guard the rest, no per- 
sonal property ; no private domestic life, 
no wife and children whom he can call his 
own. "The guardians are not to have 
houses or lands or any other property ; their 
pay is to be their food. They will not tear 
the city in pieces by differing about 'meura' 
and ' tuum ' ; the one dragging any acquisi- 
tion he has made into a private house which 
is his, and which has a separate wife and 
separate children, and private pleasures and 
pains. And as they have nothing but their 
persons which they can call their own, suits 
and complaints will have no existence among 
them ; they will be free from all those quar- 
rels of which money or children or relations 
are the occasion." 

Note, by the way, that phrase free from. 
That is always the abstract idealist's con- 
ception of liberty. The concrete idealist, 
on the other hand, will always say free in. 



Plato and Aristotle 21 y 

Aristotle, on the contrary, places virtue 
and happiness in the exercise of all one's 
faculties ; in living well and doing well. 
And he regards it as highly desirable that 
one shall have the personal friends and 
material objects toward which his affections 
and interests may find appropriate exercise 
and expression. He says, "We do not re- 
gard man as an individual leading a solitary 
life ; but we also take account of parents, 
children, wife, and in short friends and fel- 
low-citizens generally, since man is naturally 
a social being. Happiness requires exter- 
nal goods too ; for it is impossible, or at 
least not easy, to act nobly without some 
furniture of fortune. There are many 
things that can be done only through in- 
struments, so to speak, such as friends and 
wealth and political influence." Virtue, ac- 
cording to him, is concerned with the details 
of the concrete situation in which we are 
placed quite as much as with an abstract 
principle. " Thus any one can give money 
away or spend it ; but to do these things 



21 8 God's Education of Man 

to the right person, to the right extent, at 
the right time, with the right object, and 
in the right manner, is not what everybody 
can do, and is by no means easy ; and that 
is the reason why right doing is rare and 
praiseworthy and noble." 

II 

Kant and Hegel 

Germany presents these two contrasted 
types of idealists in the persons of Kant 
and Hegel. According to Kant " Duty for 
duty's sake" is the one moral principle. 
Morality has nothing directly to do with 
the natural impulses, desires, and affections. 
They are all morally indifferent ; one no 
better than another ; all capable of becom- 
ing bad when opposed to duty ; but none fit 
to enter into the end of conduct. Only the 
act which proceeds from pure reverence 
for law, regardless of consequences, interests, 
and affections, is moral. Consequently, ac- 
cording to his system, a moral man or even 
a perfectly moral act is as impossible as 



Kant and Hegel 219 

according to Plato the Ideal State is im- 
practicable and impossible. All this is high 
and mighty ; but it is n't sweet, lovely, or 
eminently practical. Kant's attempt to 
convert this abstract theory into practice 
was often ludicrous. He never traveled as 
far from home as from Boston to Worcester 
in his life ; and only once or twice in his 
fourscore years did he get as far as from 
Boston to Concord or Salem. Once a noble- 
man took him to drive and did n't get him 
home until nearly ten o'clock ; whereupon 
he provided against any possibility of such 
dissipation in the future by making a rule 
never again to get into a carriage which he 
had not hired himself, the motions of which 
he could not control. His most intimate 
friend was an Englishman who was so 
punctilious that when Kant was two minutes 
late in an appointment for a drive he drove 
off without waiting for him. He himself 
never overslept his seven hours from ten 
to five in thirty years ; and he was so regular 
in his daily walk that the neighbors could 



220 God's Education of Man 

set their watches by him. If the student 
in the front seat whom he was accustomed 
to watch during his lecture had lost a but- 
ton off his coat, Kant would lose the thread 
of his discourse. His walks were always 
solitary, because he would not run the risk 
of breathing through the mouth which talk- 
ing would involve. Perhaps, however, the 
most extreme instance of this fussy attempt 
to subject all life to strict rule was his 
management of his stockings. The ordinary 
devices for holding them in place, with their 
inevitable interference with the circulation, 
were of course out of the question in his 
well-regulated wardrobe. Yet how to get 
adequate support without unevenness of 
strain in walking was the great problem. 
So he attached a cord to each stocking, 
passed it up through a hole in his trousers 
pocket, and there connected it with a spring 
inside a little box which he carried in his 
pocket, so that the tension of the cord 
could be adjusted to the exigencies of 
walking by the spring. To such ridiculous 



Kant and Hegel 221 

pettiness was this prim and precise old 
bachelor reduced in his attempt to impose 
his own subjective rules and abstract ideals 
upon the world in which he lived. 

Hegel, on the contrary, says the first 
duty of man is to get some property : " A 
person must give to his freedom an exter- 
nal sphere, in order that he may reach the 
completeness implied in the idea. It is in 
possession first of all that the person be- 
comes rational. The possession of property 
is the first embodiment of freedom. Pro- 
perty makes objective my personal individual 
will." It is the same idea that we found 
in Aristotle, that the virtuous will must 
have some furniture of fortune as instru- 
ments of self-expression. 

Hegel's second advice to every one who 
has secured some property is to get married. 
He says, " The family is the direct substan- 
tive reality of spirit. In the family we are 
not independent persons, but members. 
Marriage is essentially an ethical relation. 
The objective point of departure is the free 



222 God's Education of Man 

consent of two to become one person. They 
give up their natural and private personality 
to enter a unity, which may be regarded as 
a limitation, but, since in it they attain to 
a substantive self-consciousness, is really 
their liberation. Marriage thus rests upon 
love, confidence, and the socializing of the 
whole individual existence. The union of 
personalities, whereby the family becomes 
one person, is the ethical spirit." Or to 
translate these rather technical phrases into 
plain English, to be good and great, you 
must have something and somebody to live 
in and care for larger than your own petty, 
empty, infinitesimal individuality. Property 
begins this expansion of the self ; business 
and profession carry it still farther; the 
family life, however, is needed to deepen 
and intensify it. Life that does not find 
its outlet through some of these concrete 
channels, whether in man or woman, is 
pretty sure to shrink and shrivel into a 
miserable fussiness about such trifles as the 
punctiliousness of personal routine, and the 



Kant and Hegel 223 

student's buttons, and the strain on the 
stocking supporters, which came to occupy 
so large a place even in the capacious mind 
of Kant. 

Hegel's third counsel is, be a good citi- 
zen. He says, "The particular person is 
essentially connected with others. Hence 
each satisfies himself and establishes him- 
self by means of others, and so must call 
in the assistance of the form of universal- 
ity. This universality is the principle of 
the civic community. The state is the 
objective spirit, and the individual has his 
truth, real existence, and ethical status 
only in being a member of it. The state 
is the embodiment of concrete freedom. 
In this concrete freedom, personal individ- 
uality and its particular interests have their 
complete development." To translate this 
again into plain English, it is only as we 
enter into and share and serve the common 
life, that our individual lives amount to 
anything. By losing our life in the larger 
life of the community we find that this 



224 God's Education of Man 

larger life of the community is really our 
own true life, for which we were made and 
in and through which alone can we come 
to our true selves. 

Ill 

Matthew Arnold and Robert Browning 

In the England of our own day, we see 
the same difference between the poetry 
of Matthew Arnold and Robert Browning. 
Matthew Arnold is the abstract idealist of 
modern poetry. We all know how superior 
he is to all that is actual ; how inadequate 
are all finite things to satisfy the craving 
of his infinite heart. We have all had our 
moods of worshiping this abstract ideal, and 
our dear selves under the guise of it. We 
have all sat in the calm moonlight and 
gazed with passionate desire on the mighty 
charm of the waters ; and prayed to be 
delivered 

" From the world's temptations, 
From tribulations, 



Matthew Arnold and Robert Browning 225 

From that fierce anguish 
Wherein we languish, 
From that torpor deep, 
Wherein we lie asleep. 
From grief that is but passion, 
From mirth that is but feigning, 
From tears that bring no healing, 
From wild and weak complaining, 
Where sorrow treads on joy, 
Where sweet things soonest cloy, 
Where faiths are built on dust, 
Where love is half mistrust." 

Then we have gone off into a cozy cor- 
ner by ourselves, and taken our ideal by the 
hand and said to it : — 

" Ah, love, let us be true 
To one another, for the world which seems 
To lie before us like a land of dreams, 
So various, so beautiful, so new, 
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, 
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain." 

Of course, though the world has none of 

•these things, and can be made to have 

none of them, we, we and our ideal, have 

an inexhaustible store, if only there were 

fit occasion to draw these treasures out. 



226 God's Education of Man 

But if we ever are so foolish as to venture 
forth to show our riches, or expect to find 
worthy souls on whom to bestow them, we 
very soon recover from the illusion, bid it 
"Farewell," and turning to our precious 
selves once more we say : — 

"And thou, thou lonely heart, 
Which never yet without remorse 
Even for a moment didst depart 
From thy remote and sphered course 
To haunt the place where passions reign — 
Hack to thy solitude again ! " 

Thus turning away from all the sordid- 
ness of a world that is not worthy of us, we 

" Yearn to the greatness of Nature, 
Rally the good in the depths of ourselves." 

Matthew Arnold, to be sure, is a great 
man, as Kant and Plato were before him ; 
and as we have doubtless all thought our- 
selves to be when we have been captivated 
by his mood. This estrangement from 
the petty and sordid details of the actual is 
one type of idealism ; and it is well for us 
that we all have to go through it. To 



Matthew Arnold and Robert Browning 22J 

remain in it, however ; to suppose that this 
is the only idealism ; to think that this 
mystical moonshine and downright mate- 
rialism are the only alternatives ; that, in- 
deed, would be fatal. When the unreality 
and absurdity of this abstract idealism 
begins to dawn upon us ; when we find it 
impossible to take it quite seriously any 
longer, then it is good for us to remember 
that this is only one type, the earliest and 
simplest, to be sure, yet the shallowest and 
silliest type of the great idealistic faith. 
When such returning sanity, or dawning 
sense of humor, impels us to close for the 
time our Matthew Arnold, it is good for us 
to open our Browning. On the threshold 
we hear a very different note : 

" I find earth not grey, but rosy, 
Heaven not grim, but fair of hue. 
Do I stoop ? I pluck a posy, 
Do I stand and stare ? All's blue." 

" How good is man's life, the mere living, how fit to 

employ 
All the mind and the heart and the senses forever in 

joy." 



228 God's Education of Man 

He lives in a world where "Law, life, 
joy, impulse are one thing." In the face of 
all the evil in the world, which he sees even 
more clearly than the mystic who turns 
away from it, Browning still confidently 
asks, 

" Is not God now i' the world his power first made ? 
Is not his love at issue still with sin, 
Visibly when a wrong is done on earth ? " 

He sees not a fancied good apart from 
evil and beyond the clouds, but a good 
in fighting evil and a joy in overcoming 
it. No soul in all the world need be shut 
out from the glory of the contest. 

" Partake my confidence ! No creature 's made so mean 
But that some way it boasts, could we investigate, 
Its supreme worth : fulfills, by ordinance of fate, 
Its momentary task, gets glory all its own, 
Tastes triumph in the world, preeminent, alone." 

This deeper idealism is patient of details, 
shrinks not from drudgery, can flourish if 
need be in poverty and obscurity and in 
the face of hatred and malice. Even Pom- 
pilia's awful fate could not cheat her of it ; 



Garrison and Lincoln 229 

nor in " The Death in the Desert " does it 
forsake the aged John. There can never be 
a situation that has not its ideal; and he who 
has eyes to look outward instead of inward 
alone, can see beauty, glory, God every- 
where. Hence the concrete idealist has 
his battles even more than other men ; for 
all men's joys and sorrows are his own, and 
all men's causes dear to him ; but it is in 
conflict and through suffering bravely borne 
that victory and glory come. 

IV 
Garrison and Lincoln 

In American political life we get a good 
example of the two types of idealists in 
men like Garrison and Phillips on the one 
hand, and Lincoln and Seward on the 
other. 

Garrison and Phillips saw "what were 
fair in life," proclaimed it in season and out 
of season, and were ready to divide the 
nation and break in pieces the Constitution 
that the negro might be freed. They did 



2 jo God's Education of Man 

an important service in this way. But we 
owe it more to Lincoln and Seward than to 
them that this great united Nation stands 
to-day the mighty and magnificent embodi- 
ment of the concrete condition which in 
its abstract form the earlier prophets so 
vigorously proclaimed. Lincoln and Sew- 
ard hated slavery and believed in its re- 
striction and ultimate abolition. But they 
were concrete rather than abstract idealists. 
In Aristotle's phrase, they knew how "to 
do these things to the right person, to the 
right extent, at the right time, with the 
right object, and in the right manner." 
Consequently they resisted the pressure of 
radicals who would have brought the mat- 
ter to an issue before the country was 
sufficiently united to stand the strain ; and 
shocked the reluctance of conservatives who 
would have waited till every one was agreed. 
At the moment when the exigencies of 
war gave the opportunity, and public opin- 
ion was prepared to sustain it, they actually 
set free the slaves, and guaranteed the per- 



Burne-Jones and Watts 231 

petuity of the freedom which they gave 
by all the force of a victorious and united 
nation. 

V 
Burne-Jones and Watts 

Burne-Jones and Watts illustrate these 
opposite tendencies in painting. Burne- 
Jones, when asked to paint a portrait of a 
certain lady, replied : " Certainly I shall be 
pleased to paint your portrait, but you 
mustn't expect that it will look like you." In 
other words, he was willing to take the gen- 
eral cast of countenance of the lady in ques- 
tion as an outline; but even in a portrait 
it was his own pet doll which he purposed 
to represent. Watts, on the other hand, 
reads the writings of his subject, talks 
with him on his favorite themes, and as 
a result gives you, not his preconceived 
ideal of a philosopher, but the sad lucidity 
which a repressive education had cut into 
the face of John Stuart Mill, or the deep 
reflectiveness which a life of introspective 



2 $2 God's Education of Man 

analysis had engraved on the features of 
James Martineau. Even when these two 
painters treat the same ideal theme, how 
different the result ! Burne-Jones's Hope 
is the same elongated, elaborated piece of 
woeful femininity which meets us in all his 
pictures, save that in this particular pose of 
" Hope," her left hand is aimlessly uplifted 
into the clouds which are but a few inches 
above her lofty head, and gropes helplessly 
about in that misty medium. 

Watts's Hope, on the contrary, robed in 
the most beautiful of blues, sits firmly on 
the round earth from which all else has 
fled, clinging to the lyre which alone is left 
her. Only one string of this remains un- 
broken. Blindfolded as she is she leans 
her ear close to the one unbroken string 
and draws from it the music that still is 
latent there. So intent is she on the music 
that is left that all losses are forgotten, and 
the whole round world is music to her ear, 
because her whole attention is centred on 
the one spot whence music can be drawn. 






Foreign Missions 233 

That is the brave, true, deep form of hope, 
which seizes the little good there is still 
left in a desolate and discordant life, lives 
so close to it and makes so much of it that 
the one point stands for all ; and because 
that one point is good and we are absorbed 
in that, therefore the whole world becomes 
for us good and glorious. 

VI 

Foreign Missions. President Nbtt and Secre- 
tary Anderson. Cyrus Hamlin and David 
Livingstone 

Foreign missions is the grandest example 
of high and holy idealism the world has 
seen. Like all idealistic movements this 
may be approached in either of two ways. 
Here, as elsewhere, i the abstract idealism 
came first to prepare the way for the 
concrete. 

Whoever has read the literature of the 
missionary movement at the beginning of 
this century must have been impressed by 
the extremely abstract character of the con- 



234 God's Education of Man 

siderations and motives which formed the 
basis of appeal. The soul and its destiny, 
not life and its problems ; the individual 
and his nature, not peoples and their envi- 
ronment ; the glories of heaven and the 
horrors of hell, not the happiness of homes 
and the welfare of communities, were the 
chosen themes of missionary discourse. 
For illustration of the abstract character 
of these appeals I will not resort to the 
extravagant utterances of students carried 
away by youthful enthusiasm, nor to the 
morbid psychology which permeated like 
a poison the volumes of the widely circu- 
lated " Evangelical Library." I will take 
the statements of the most mature and 
enlightened leaders, delivered on represen- 
tative occasions. Here is a page from a 
sermon preached by President Nott before 
the General Assembly of the Presbyterian 
Church by appointment of the Standing 
Committee on Missions in 1806 : — 

"Brethren, have you sufficiently con- 
sidered the duration of eternity ? Have you 



Nott and Anderson 235 

duly appreciated the value of the soul ? 
The narrow isthmus which intervenes be- 
tween you and the world of spirits is al- 
ready sinking; presently death will have 
swallowed it up forever ! Let your thoughts 
carry you beyond it ; lose yourself in the 
immensity of those ages that have no end ; 
— ages which the soul inherits, and during 
which its powers increase, its capacity of 
happiness and misery expands, and ex- 
pands, and expands, till (overwhelming 
thought) it is capable of enjoying the joys 
or of suffering the miseries of a world. 

" Such souls those probationers possess, 
in whose behalf I now address you. To 
that eternity with which your minds are 
filled they are hastening. Before they 
launch into it look up to heaven and see 
the preparations which grace is making and 
the glory to which grace is waiting to re- 
ceive them. 

"Before they launch into it look down 
to hell and see the punishment with which 
justice threatens them; take one deep 



236 God's Education of Man 

and solemn view of that fire which is never 
quenched, and of that worm in the midst of 
it which never dies ! Ah me, what a spec- 
tacle of woe ! venting unavailing cries to a 
devouring flame and pouring out vain com- 
plaints to an unpitying dungeon ; which, 
when the sufferer asks, How long ? echoes 
back, Eternity. Ages heaped on ages 
intervene ; again the sufferer asks, How 
long ? and again is echoed back, Eternity." 
Could anything be more abstract, far- 
fetched, unreal, false, than that way of 
looking at the matter ? Instead of human 
hearts throbbing with passions and affec- 
tions good and bad, you have probationers 
possessing souls. In place of the eager 
hopes of youth, the burdens and responsi- 
bilities of manhood, the reverence due to 
old age, and all the joys and sorrows that 
cluster about the cradle, the wedding, and 
the funeral, you have heaven, hell, the glory 
and flame, cries and complaints echoed back 
from the intervening ages and the unpity- 
ing eternities. And in keeping with it all, in 



Nott and Anderson 237 

place of the righteous rule of the Heavenly 
Father and the winning influence of Jesus 
of Nazareth, you have justice with its brutal 
threats and grace with its formal prepa- 
rations, and all this sweet, rich, glorious 
human life of ours reduced to the mere 
preliminaries of a spectacular launching! 
Yet, hollow and empty and unreal and abs- 
tract as these considerations strike us 
to-day, it behooves us to remember that 
with such barren abstractions as these our 
fathers, at the beginning of the century, did 
move the world and make their mark on 
human history. Abstract idealism is doubt- 
less absurd and unreal when once you see 
through it ; but it will be no slight task for 
us to accomplish with our more concrete 
and vital concepts as much practical good as 
they did with these discarded and outworn 
abstractions. 

These views continued to be dominant in 
missionary circles until about the middle of 
the century. As late as 1845 Secretary 
Rufus Anderson, of the American Board, 



238 God's Education of Man 

in a sermon at the ordination of Edward 
Webb, as a missionary to the heathen, said : 
" The foreign missionary considers not so 
much the relations of man to man as of 
man to God ; not so much the relations and 
interests of time as those of eternity ; not 
so much the intellectual and social degra- 
dation and debasement, the result of bar- 
barism or of iron-handed oppression, as the 
alienation and estrangement of man from 
his Maker ; having as little to do with the 
relations of this life and the things of the 
world and of sense, and as few relations to 
the kingdoms of this world as is consistent 
with the successful prosecution of his one 
grand object — the restoring in the immortal 
soul of man of that blessed attraction to the 
centre of the Spiritual Universe which was 
lost at the fall. It is not fine conceptions 
of the beautiful and orderly in human so- 
ciety that will fire the zeal of the mission- 
ary ; it is not rich and glowing conceptions 
of the life and duties of a pastor ; it is 
not broad and elevated views of theological 



Hamlin and Livingston 239 

truth, nor precise and comprehensive views 
of the relation of that truth to moral sub- 
jects. It is something more than all this, 
often the result of a different cast of mind 
and combination of ideas. The true mis- 
sionary character is based upon a single 
sublime conception — that of reconciling im- 
mortal souls to God. To gain this the mis- 
sionary needs to have had deep experience 
of his own enmity to God and hell-desert." 
The transition from this abstract atti- 
tude, with enmity to God and hell-desert as 
its starting point, as little as possible to do 
with the relations of this life as its method, 
and the restoration of the soul to the estate 
it had before the fall as its goal, to a more 
concrete and practical conception is well 
illustrated in the life of Cyrus Hamlin. 
Trained as he was in the theological con- 
ceptions of his time, he shared in large 
measure these abstract conceptions of doc- 
trinal theology. He was, however, pre- 
eminently a man of common sense. He 
had served an apprenticeship to a jeweler 



240 God's Education of Man 

before he went to college and the seminary. 
He had made farm implements with his 
own hands when a boy. While a student 
at Bowdoin College he had made a loco- 
motive which gave the people of Maine 
the first illustration of the practical work- 
ing of a steam engine, which he sold to the 
college for $175, and which remains in its 
museum to this day. He very soon dis- 
covered that even an immortal soul, re- 
stored to that attraction to the centre of 
the spiritual universe which it had lost 
at the fall, cannot thrive in idleness ; and 
so he set these redeemed souls to work 
making rat traps and ash pans and stove- 
pipes ; baking bread and washing vermin- 
infested uniforms and blankets. He fought 
the cholera with wise sanitation and strong 
medicine. He founded a college ; after 
seven years of persistent pushing secured 
the best available site for it ; got it placed 
under the protection of the American flag ; 
and there trained the men who were to 
write the constitutions of states and hold 



Hamlin and Livingston 241 

positions of influence in the empire. With 
Yankee shrewdness he saw what most 
needed to be done, found out how to do it, 
and did it. Thus, by making the spot of 
earth and the group of people to whom 
he was sent a little holier and better, he 
commended his gospel of a good and holy 
God who is everywhere working for the 
best. Mackay, of Uganda, is another ex- 
ample of the missionary of the concrete. 
He describes himself as " engineer, builder, 
printer, physician, surgeon, and general arti- 
ficer to Mtesa," and says, " Among the sav- 
ages we have got to be savage, or at least 
semi-savage. Their little loves and hates 
we have to take an interest in. It is neces- 
sary that we make ourselves at home among 
the people and learn to like them and their 
country." 

The comprehensive purpose of the mod- 
ern missionary is well set forth in the let- 
ter in which David Livingstone made his 
application for appointment to the Lon- 
don Missionary Society. " The missionary's 



242 God's Education of Man 

object is to endeavor, by every means in 
his power, to make known the gospel by 
preaching, exhortation, conversation, in- 
struction of the young ; improving, so far 
as in his power, the temporal condition of 
those among whom he labors, by intro- 
ducing the arts and sciences of civilization 
and doing everything to commend Chris- 
tianity to their hearts and consciences." It 
was his constant effort among them to 
resemble Christ. By his kindliness, sym- 
pathy, generous appreciation, and sincere 
friendliness ; by his practice of the healing 
art, and his fidelity to promises, he won the 
natives to God by first winning them to 
himself. He could not take as serious a 
view of man's lost estate as he and others 
thought he ought to, and writes, " I wish 
my mind were more deeply affected by the 
condition of those who are perishing in this 
heathen land. I am sorry to say I don't 
feel half as concerned for them as I 
ought." Nevertheless, if he couldn't feel 
concerned about the condition of humanity, 



Two Types of Idealists 243 

he did what was better, he loved men. 
At the very time that he was reproaching 
himself for lack of concern for their ab- 
stract theological condition he could write 
in all sincerity, "I am only determined 
to go on and do all I can while able for 
the poor degraded people of the north." 

VII 

The Practical Difference between the Two Types 
of Idealists. The Greater Difficulty the 
Greater Glory 

Such are the two permanent types of 
idealists, whether among Greeks or Ger- 
mans or Anglo-Saxons ; whether among 
philosophers, poets, politicians, painters, or 
missionaries. Both types are great. The 
abstract type is at first sight the more strik- 
ing and alluring. It is easily understood, 
and to live according to it is not so very 
hard. 

We all find idealism first in its abstract 
form, and sometimes are tempted to rest 
content with that. Hence it is important 



244 God's Education of Man 

to realize the fearful limitations of this 
form of faith. For just so far as we are 
bound up in this way of thinking our per- 
sonal relations become morbid, critical, cyn- 
ical, unsatisfying. Either we have failed 
to find any actual human being who quite 
comes up to this abstract ideal we cherish ; 
and are beginning to look on common men 
and women with something of the feeling, 
" Stand by thyself, come not near to me, 
for I am holier than thou ;" or else, like 
Burne-Jones in his portrait, we have dressed 
up one after another of our fellows in the 
finery of our own ideal only to realize too late 
that it was borrowed finery after all ; and 
then we have had to administer to our poor 
disillusioned soul some such form of conceit- 
consoling medicine as the " Farewell " we 
had a few moments ago from Matthew 
Arnold. The plain fact is that if we start 
out with a ready-made ideal of our own, 
and like the character in the ancient drama 
go to and fro in the earth, and walk up 
and down in it, seeking to find the exact 



Two Types of Idealists 245 

embodiment of this ideal of ours, we shall 
wander lonely, bitter, cynical and sour to 
the end of our days and remain to the last 
" unfreed, having seen nothing, still unblest." 
On the other hand, if we look out on life 
with an eye alert to catch the indications 
of the ideals that are partially embodied in 
the souls of other men, and with a heart 
ready to worship at altars not altogether of 
our own construction, then we shall find 
the world full, not indeed of idols our own 
hands have fashioned, but of ideals, incom- 
plete and unperfected to be sure, yet slowly 
and surely forming themselves under the 
very hand of God. Then we shall exclaim 
with Ruskin, " There is a perfect ideal to 
be wrought out of every face around us." 
Every person whom we meet will be a 
potential temple of the Holy Spirit ; and 
every bush upon the highway will be ablaze 
with God. 

It makes the same mighty difference 
with the outcome of our work. So long as 
our idealism is of the abstract, Platonic, 



246 God's Education of Man 

John the Baptist, Kantian type, we shall 
bemoan in solitary, helpless uselessness the 
corruption of politics, the dishonesty of 
business, the cruelty of competition, the 
artificiality of society, the inefficiency of 
education. We shall wait resignedly for 
philosophers to become kings, and the cate- 
gorical imperative to be subscribed to by all 
manufacturers and merchants, and existing 
constitutions to be abolished, and systems of 
education to reform themselves, and ineffi- 
cient innocence to be enthroned by miracle 
or magic. Either we shall do that, or else 
we shall beat our heads against these es- 
tablished injustices for a time; and finding 
that of no avail, we shall sink down into 
a despair deeper than that of the mere 
dreamer, because it can add to the forebod- 
ing of the dreamer the clinching " I told 
you so " of the man who has tried to reform 
the world and miserably failed. 

How different from that the work of the 
true idealist. He knows as well as your 
bitterest pessimist how unjust, imperfect, 



Two Types of Idealists 247 

corrupt and inefficient most of our human 
arrangements are. Yet he sees that every- 
one of them has at its centre a principle of 
good. He seizes that element of good; 
with firm grasp on that, he gradually but 
persistently tears away one after another 
of the useless integuments that wrap it up ; 
pulls off the foreign matter that has fastened 
upon it, cuts out the rot. Though his 
work is never done, and the outcome of it 
is never perfect and complete, yet, give 
this man time, money, and opportunity for 
speech and work, and in the course of years 
he will make the most defective system not 
only endurable but useful ; the most decrepit 
institution not only tolerable but credit- 
able ; the most clumsy constitution not only 
harmless but beneficent ; the most degraded 
tribe not merely respectable, but, in some 
simple way adapted to their condition and 
development, positively and nobly Christian. 
Let us not, however, part with the ab- 
stract idealist in a tone of censure and 
severity. He, too, has his place, and it is 



248 God's Education of Man 

a great one. Plato prepares the way for 
Aristotle, Kant for Hegel, Garrison for 
Lincoln, as John the Baptist did for Jesus ; 
and this is no mean service. There are 
stages in the development of the individual 
when the abstract idealist can render a ser- 
vice which if attempted by the concrete 
idealist would prove premature. In a class 
of beginners in philosophy one finds it pro- 
fitable to spend weeks in reading Plato's 
dialogues, leaving only a few days for the 
severer study of Aristotle. One can make 
a class shrink with horror from lying or 
licentiousness by Kant's searching maxim 
"Thou shalt not treat humanity, whether 
in thyself or others, as a means," as one 
could never do with the more positive 
and profound formulas of Hegelian Situ 
liclikcit. Garrison and Phillips roused the 
conscience of the nation as even Lincoln 
and Seward would have failed to do. One 
is not altogether sorry when he sees col- 
lege boys devouring Matthew Arnold, or 
finds the rooms of college girls adorned 



Two Types of Idealists 249 

with the fancies of Burne- Jones. One is 
not altogether sorry to see missions main- 
tained on worn-out conceptions. For we 
ought to recognize all these things as a 
stage through which most earnest people 
in some form or other have to go ; and 
we know that if the men and women who 
are attracted by them have much depth of 
nature, or any redeeming spark of humor, 
they will in due time see their inadequacy, 
and pass on to take their places humbly 
and joyfully in the ranks of the concrete 
idealists. Few people come to this deeper 
idealism directly. To those who have never 
known the bitterness and isolation of the 
preparatory stage, the eating and drinking 
of the truer idealist appears like the eating 
and drinking of a gluttonous man and a 
winebibber. Concrete idealism does not 
show off the obvious ascetic stamp upon it 
that abstract idealism always wears; and 
hence it is often confounded with sheer 
materialism, which eats and drinks simply 
to be merry, because to-morrow we die. 



250 God's Education of Man 

Let us then, prize each of these types at 
its true worth. Let us be ready to give to 
him that needeth it free range in the wide 
domains of the abstract. Let us not count 
as altogether wasted the half dozen years 
or more that we ourselves may have wan- 
dered in that wilderness ; or hesitate to 
fall back upon its mystic consolations in 
hours of crisis and discouragement. But 
let us neither for ourselves or others dare 
to be content with that stage as though it 
were ultimate. While we give full credit 
to whatever preparatory work the John the 
Baptist type of men may do, let us never 
forget that though " of them that are born 
of women there is none greater " than the 
abstract, subjective idealist, yet he that is 
but little in the concrete kingdom of ob- 
jective idealism is very much greater than 
he. If we see the religious thought of the 
church gradually shifting from the abstract 
conception of a merely transcendent to the 
concrete conception of an immanent God, 
let us not be alarmed. For though church 



Greater Difficulty, Greater Glory 251 

history warns us that in time past Aristo- 
telian and Hegelian conceptions have not 
been as fruitful in piety and fervor as their 
more superficial and ascetic, and therefore 
more readily intelligible and easily applicable 
opposites, the time has come when religious 
truth must be restated in these terms, and 
lived out on these principles, if it is to retain 
the assent and support of those among us 
who have accepted the results of the doc- 
trine of evolution in science, and the con- 
clusions of criticism in history and literature. 
The duty that confronts the church to- 
day is far more difficult than any that has 
confronted it before. It is nothing less 
than intelligently to apprehend this modern 
life of ours in all its infinite complexity, 
and then to reduce it to the unity and re- 
store it to the peace which comes alone 
from seeing all the details of daily life and 
social intercourse and public service in the 
light of their common relation to that 
blessed will of God which Christ has re- 
vealed to us as helpful and redeeming love 



252 God's Education of Man 

toward all our fellow-men. This work re- 
quires a broader and deeper training in our 
schools and colleges and theological semi- 
naries, a more direct and practical preach- 
ing in our pulpits, and above all a more 
simple and earnest friendliness toward all 
men, even the lowliest and worst, on the 
part of those who represent Christ's king- 
dom in the world. To this harder task the 
awakened church will not prove unfaithful. 
The greater the difficulty, the greater the 
glory "to him that overcometh." 



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